"Vera" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 17 Aug 2005 12:55:20 +0100, "Mary Fisher"
wrote:

Can you navigate back to your house if let loose hundreds of miles away
with
no previous experience?


Of course you can't. Does that make you stupid?

I am one of the clever ones who can

a) read signposts
b) Ask for directions to the nearest train station
c) Recognise a phone box from a fair distance away
d) Work a mobile phone
e) Read a map
f) hail a taxi

All those need previous experience, which I specified. A pigeon doesn't do
any of those.


To say that any other creature is stupid because it doesn't behave like
you
is irrational.

To insist any creature with a brain the size of a pea is NOT stupid
is, well, a bit weird.

You've seen the size of pigeon's brain then?

Or - more relevantly - compared it, size for size, with a human brain?

As it happens I don't mind pigeons too much - the birds I hate are
bloody magpies! A cooing pigeon is pleasant compared the squawking of
any member of the crow family that spots my cat strolling through the
garden. The damn magpies even come and sit on the balcony chairs and
scream at the cat asleep on our bed! If it were not for the fact that
we have neigbours one side and over the back I would get an air-rifle
and take a few potshots.

I'm not keen on cats, they scratch in my garden and leave stinking deposits
and they account for more small bird deaths than all the magpie (corvid)
family combined. And they howl and spit and scratch and leave pawmarks on
the windows and cars - and have ruined an expensive caravan cover by
climbing up a corner of it and shredding the top.

They're cats. As pigeons are pigeons and mapies are magpies. None of them
has damaged the Earth or others of their own kind as much as Man. Which is
superior?

Mary