Today, humanity has abandoned its former friends: pigeons feed on garbage and face deadly threats in cities, from heavy traffic to bird nets and spikes trying to stop them from nesting on buildings.

Every day, many suffer injuries as they try to survive in our concrete jungles. Help is hard to find. Because they aren't classified as typical wildlife, nor as pets or farm animals, both private veterinarians and wildlife rescue centres are reluctant to treat them.

Světlana Vávrová and Veronika Petráková from Czechia decided to change that, and have been rescuing injured pigeons for years. “I've always felt sympathy for these birds,” Petráková told us. “The situations we've seen in the streets motivated us to act.”

This year, the project is growing. Close to Brno, they're building a rehabilitation centre for injured pigeons. When finished, the facility will provide shelter for up to 10,000 birds, including a quarantine zone and a new home for birds unable to return to the “wild”.

“A lot of the work has been done already, we just need to build outdoor cages,” Petráková said, noting that lack of funding is slowing down the process. The project has been running solely on donations and voluntary work.

Looking back at humanity's history with pigeons, we really owe it to them.

After humans domesticated pigeons' wild ancestors at least 4,000 years ago, they raised them mainly for meat. Soon, though, they noticed the birds' unique gift: pigeons get highly attached to their home and can find a way back to it even from long distances.

Around 1200 BC, pigeons were first trained as message carriers in Egypt and Persia. They also served in wars: around 250,000 pigeons were used for communication and surveillance by the United Kingdom during WWII alone, of which 32 were awarded the Dickin Medal dedicated to animals who served in the war. But that was their last big “work shift”.

When radio and telephones took over, pigeons quickly turned into unwanted invaders of urban spaces. In the 1960s, New Yorkers started referring to them as “rats with wings”, and the myth of pigeons spreading diseases around cities quickly caught on in Europe, too.

In reality, pigeons pose little threat to public health. Unless you have a weak immune system and regularly come into contact with pigeon “poop dust” while sweeping a balcony, for example, the chance of getting infected is minimal.

You might think: Why don't they just nest somewhere else?

They can't. Centuries of selective breeding taught them to live close to us and become dependent on humans, who now try so hard to get rid of them.

Petráková believes we can integrate pigeons into cities without provoking the anger of balcony owners stuck in a never-ending battle against pigeon poop.

Managed lofts are one solution: pigeons appreciate assigned spaces for nesting and naturally concentrate around them, which means less bird poop elsewhere and relatively easy disposal. The same goes for assigned feeding spots.

“It's always better to look for suitable spots and explore ways to coexist, rather than trying to eliminate the pigeons or ban feeding. That's impossible to enforce anyway,” Petráková told us. Several German cities already use this approach.

In cases where the population still needs managing, replacing real pigeon eggs with fake ones is a non-violent way of doing so. That's the easiest to manage in supervised lofts. “If there's a consensus that we need to gradually decrease the pigeon population, this is surely the most humane method,” Petráková agreed.