The war on live-pigeon shoots
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
It's got it all: shotguns, flying drones, dildos, masked men, high-stakes gambling, interstate avian kidnapping and 55-gallon drums full of dead and dying pigeons.
The ongoing fight between Pennsylvania’s proponents of live-pigeon shoots and animal-rights activists has it all: shotguns, unmanned drones, dildos, masked men, high-stakes gambling, interstate avian kidnapping and 55-gallon drums full of dead and dying pigeons. Several of these are dryly detailed (“rubber facsimiles of male genitalia”) in the civil suit that Bensalem’s Philadelphia Gun Club (PGC) filed April 4 in federal court against Showing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK), seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.
This is far from the first lawsuit filed in the decades-long battle, although it’s a bit uncommon in that the gun clubs are usually the defendants, not the plaintiffs. Here, the PGC accuses SHARK of “a pattern of harassment, hounding, intimidation, trespass, invasion of privacy and intrusion,” by hanging around outside during the live-pigeon shoots that are held 10 to 12 times a year, playing loud, obscene recordings, brandishing signs with dildos glued to them and photographing faces and license plates, sometimes flying a drone. The photos are later linked to identities and posted online in what the suit calls “an advanced form of ‘cyberbullying’” and “an incitement to riot and commit acts of violence.”
Animal-rights activists call live-pigeon shoots horrifying, wasteful, pointless, illegal slaughter; participants call it a tradition that’s certainly no worse than other ways humans legally kill birds. An independent poll of 625 Pennsylvanians this past fall defined it this way: “Pigeon shoots are contests similar to clay or skeet shoots where contestants pay a fee to shoot live animals that are released and launched from traps. The competitors score by dropping the birds into a scoring ring.” Between 75 and 80 percent of people responded that they did not regard this as legitimate sport and would support legislation to ban the use of live birds.
Pennsylvania isn’t the only state that holds live-pigeon shoots or lacks an explicit ban on them, but it definitely is the place that’s most associated with them. State law on animal cruelty and pest control is a bit murky — though both sides insist the law is clearly in their favor, both are making efforts to get the state legislature to make it explicit. On April 7, state Rep. Mark Keller (R-Landisburg) announced plans to amend the Pennsylvania Game Code to explicitly permit live-pigeon shoots; SB 510, which would explicitly ban them, has 23 bipartisan sponsors in the state Senate.
Some clarification is needed: The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that under current law a district attorney could not be forced to prosecute pigeon shooters for animal cruelty. “It is truly shocking that live, not clay, pigeons are catapulted into the air for target practice. However,” the opinion read, “it is for the legislature to address this practice.”
Heidi Prescott, senior VP of campaigns at the Humane Society of the United States, has been trying to get the legislature to address this practice for more than two decades. “Even though most hunters in Pennsylvania don’t participate in live-pigeon shoots nor find them in any way, shape or form to be hunting, there are [Pennsylvania state] legislators who want that A-plus rating and fold when the NRA lobbies against it,” says Prescott. Since 1987, there’s been about one legislative attempt to ban live pigeon shoots per year, but they almost never get out of committee. “I think the last time a freestanding bill made it to the floor was in the ’80s,” says Prescott, though a sneaky amendment got within three votes of passing in 1999.
Groups like SHARK, frustrated, have turned to making things unpleasant for the pigeon shooters — picketing the clubs, playing obscene recordings at a high volume, ensuring any Google search for an attendee’s name or business will turn up a page with gory videos of pigeons flopping around in agony. Some have even protested outside attendees’ businesses.
Steve Hindi, the force behind SHARK and a defendant in the PGC’s lawsuit, doesn’t shy away from the extreme: He once served six months in jail for using an engine-powered hang glider to disrupt a goose hunt. Hindi says that since he and SHARK started showing up at the PGC in 2009, average attendance at live shoots has dropped from a few dozen to fewer than 10. (The PGC declined, via lawyer Sean Corr, to speak with City Paper.)
“If you look in our videos, you’ll see them drive up with covered faces; they put on masks and cover their license plates,” says Hindi. “It’s not something they want their employees or associates to know that they’re doing.” Hindi says the PGC ended its live-shoot season a month early this year because of SHARK’s efforts.
Protests have drastically decreased the number of live shoots across the state over the last couple of decades. The most famous one, held since 1934 in Hegins in Schuylkill County over Labor Day weekend, used to be attended by thousands and went through an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 birds. (Hindi estimates that PGC goes through 400 to 600 birds per shoot.) The Hegins shoot finally shut itself down in 1999, having long since become an annual shouting match between animal-rights protesters and out-of-town sportsmen, Ted Nugent and the (uninvited) KKK.
Live shoots still happen, of course. You just need to know the right people. The attitude can be summed up by a joking response from a thread on a shotgun discussion forum:
1st RULE: You do not talk about FIGHT CLUB.
2nd RULE: You DO NOT talk about FIGHT CLUB.
It started being a thing you thought twice about talking about in the 1880s, when glass balls and clay pigeons had become widespread, viable substitutes for live birds. The PCG, founded in 1877, had its first pigeon shooter convicted of cruelty to animals in 1890. “The last hurrah of live-pigeon shoots was at the Paris Olympics of 1900,” writes Andrew Blechman in his 2007 book Pigeons. “A loud outcry from humane societies doomed the sport to just one Olympic showing.”
Even Ernest Hemingway recognized it as a taboo subject in a 1949 magazine piece about life in Cuba: “You do not tell [outsiders] about the shooting club just down the road, where we used to shoot the big live-pigeon matches for the large money. … Maybe they think live-pigeon shooting is wrong. … Maybe they are right. Maybe it is wrong. It certainly is a miserable spectator sport. But with strong, really fast birds, it is still the best participant sport for betting I know.”
The gambling aspect of live-pigeon shoots is important, but if you don’t talk about Fight Club, you really don’t talk about under-the-table high-stakes betting at Fight Club. On a couple of dozen gun and hunting forums like huntingpa.com and the Pennsylvania Firearm Owners Association, though, people who say they’ve attended shoots commonly say things like: “The money is insane. As a rule it isn’t the purse that is the real big dinero but the side bets. A hundred a bird is startin’ money.” And: “Pigeon shooting is not illegal, nor should it be. … The negative part is what surrounds it: lots of money and gambling. Often, rotund, well-lubricated individuals betting on birds that are not eaten.” (The only photo City Paper was able to find of a live shoot at the PGC is of a large man in a brown tweed three-piece ensemble and fedora shouldering an expensive-looking shotgun, smoking a cigar and holding a gold pocket watch.)
The poll last fall that found that 75 to 80 percent of Pennsylvanians disapprove of live pigeon shoots seems to be paralleled in gun and hunting forums — both in counting disdainful posts like “It’s like going deer hunting at a petting zoo” and in an informal poll at the Pennsylvania Firearm Owners Association board in which 77 percent of respondents said they did not regard live-pigeons shoots as legitimate hunting.
“Caged shoots like this make all hunting look bad. … When the public sees caged, launched animals being tossed in front of hunters, what message is passed about fair chase and respect for wildlife?” wrote one poster. “Why is the NRA wasting time and resources on this? Are there not enough important issues that don’t make hunters look so stupid?”
The majority of the opposition to a ban on pigeon shoots seems to come from wariness of a “slippery slope.” In an email rallying supporters to contact Pennsylvania state legislators about a potential bill in 2011, the NRA wrote: “Make no mistake; this isn’t just about banning bird shooting, but banning all hunting species by species.”
Pennsylvania is a huge state for the NRA; in 2012, the state sold 2.5 million hunting licenses, second only to Wisconsin. That same year, Pennsylvania was number four on the list of states where the NRA spent the most money. One of the plaintiffs in PGC’s recent suit, former club president Leo Holt, is even a former NRA board member.
The statistic showing that a large majority of Pennsylvanians would be in favor of banning live-pigeon shoots, in fact, is almost irrelevant: This doesn’t seem like it has much to do with Pennsylvania anymore.
Five of the seven plaintiffs and all the defendants in Philadelphia Gun Club vs. SHARK are from out of state. SHARK is based in Chicago, and the Humane Society and the NRA are both headquartered in the D.C. area. The Philadelphia Gun Club tax forms list its official address in New Jersey. Even many of the birds used to come from out of state — in 2007, a rash of incidents in New York City parks in which pigeons were lured by handfuls of feed, scooped up in nets by the dozens and driven away in vans resulted in exposés in the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal detailing how many of these birds ended up as target practice in Pennsylvania.
Prescott says that her side is slowly winning the larger battle, though, and that after 20 years of work she believes she’ll see a ban on live-pigeon shoots pass in Pennsylvania soon. “Every year, more and more legislators side with us on this. It’s a barbaric practice, like cockfighting or dogfighting, and it’s time for the legislature to finally address this.”
