Labor Day pigeon massacre takes a shot at human ignorance

September 5, 1990

The York (PA) Dispatch

Larry Hicks

It was a beautiful Labor Day weekend in Hegins, PA., although that probably depended on which end of the gun you stood.

Mother Nature provided a near-perfect setting for Monday’s Great American Pigeon Shootout – the official name for the Labor Day event is The Fred Coleman Memorial Shoot, but that doesn’t adequately describe the occasion.

In Hegins, a community of about 4,000 residents in Schuylkill County, fewer than 100 sportsmen gathered Monday to put 4,800 pigeons out of their misery. They did it for charity, hoping to raise $10,000 to help maintain local parks.

Participants think this is good, clean fun. For 55 years, it’s been an easy way to make some money. In a town where the motto should be, “The only good pigeon is a dead pigeon,” this massacre is considered sport.

But then, all shooting is considered sport in this country, as long as there is a human being on the business end of the gun and a helpless creature at the other end.

One York-area hunter wondered out loud Monday what was the difference between paying the state for a hunting license and then shooting doves and pheasants or paying to enter a pigeon shoot and then shooting pigeons.

When you put it that way, it is difficult to distinguish the difference.

Of course, when you put it that way, buying a license to shoot deer, bear, rabbits, squirrels or turkey isn’t all that different from paying to shoot pigeons, either.

But there is a difference. If you buy a hunting license, it is presumed you’re doing so because you intend to eat what you kill. Call it conservation, call it feeding your family, call it whatever you like, but there are darned few licensed hunters who will admit that they hunt just for the joy of killing. That doesn’t sound very nice, so most hunters will almost always take the easy way out and say they’re hunting to put food on their tables.

Although wild animals being chased by licensed hunters don’t have much of a fighting chance, they do, at least have some chance. That’s a lot more than can be said of the Hegins pigeons.

Take a look at the mechanics involved with putting on the largest live pigeon shoot in the world.

Competitors using shotguns stand about 20 yards – that’s about the distance from the pitcher’s mound to home plate in a major league baseball game – from the birds, which are cooped up in metal cages.

Then the birds are released, not in groups, but one at a time so the shooter can more easily follow the flight of the bird. The guns roar as youngsters release one bird after another. Done in this fashion, the birds are little more than clay pigeons, but with eyes, wings and a beating heart. They have almost no chance at survival.

After a group of birds is shot in this manner, the “trapper boys” run onto the field to scoop them off the ground. These youngsters grab the birds, some still fluttering on the ground because they are only wounded, and quickly wring the birds’ necks or pull their heads off altogether.

All of the dead birds are tossed into a barrel, later to be ground up and used as fertilizer.

Nary a single bird makes it to anyone’s dinner table in Hegins. These birds are not to be eaten, just shot and forgotten.

This is considered fun. It is also considered sport.

That is disturbing enough. Worse is the attitude of participants and members of the community who wore T-shirts that said, “Kill Them All. Let God Sort Them Out,” and “Let Feathers Fly and Freedom Ring.”

One 12 year-old seventh-grader wore a T-shirt that said, “Save a Pigeon. Kill a Protester.”

Tammy Cox, a mother with three children, said she’s sick of protesters and told them to “take care of their own back yards.”

Anne Coleman made the point that Hegins’ churches are packed on Sundays. We have more churches that barrooms. So we’re doing something right.”

Another seventh-grader described the animal rights protesters as “retarded.” He said, “They should protest something else. It’s not too cruel because the pigeons carry diseases.

The child is correct. It’s obvious that the 25 animal rights protesters who were arrested Monday by state police were protesting the wrong thing.

Instead of animal rights, they’d be a lot better off protesting the ignorance of human beings. In Hegins, stupidity would be a lot easier to prove than cruelty.