A lot of people don’t like pigeons. They see the birds as dirty, crowding city streets and eating scraps from the ground. Like rats and raccoons, they are pests that we begrudgingly put up with. The only people who seem to like pigeons, according to popular imagery, are lonely old men who feed them from park benches. Many people wouldn’t miss pigeons if there were less of them, and might even enjoy the idea of getting rid of them, as represented in Tom Lehrer’s comic song “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.”
In the new documentary Million Dollar Pigeons, which screened at this year’s Hot Docs festival, director Gavin Fitzgerald delves into the world of people whose lives revolve around their love of pigeons. These pigeon-fanciers breed birds to compete in races around the world in the hopes of winning monetary prizes. You wouldn’t know it from pigeons’ mainstream un-popularity, but pigeon racing is a worldwide sport and it’s a big business.
The filmmaker doesn’t bring any voiceover intervention into the presentation of the birds and people involved in the sport, but the choice of subjects leans into the fact that for most of us, pigeon racing is a strange sport. This is exemplified in one of the main figures in the film, an Irish hobbyist pigeon fancier, named John O’Brien, who doesn’t have the money to make it big like the wealthier pigeon fanciers, but is still ambitious. He seems misguided and naïve at moments, but his humorous commentary on his life and fellow pigeon fanciers makes him a fun subject to follow for the duration of the film. It is fitting to focus on characters like him when portraying a sport that many of us would find strange in and of itself. Following his foibles, narrated by witty comments in his heavy accent, just adds to the fun and fascinating ride that the film takes us on.
More than any other sport of animal husbandry, the pigeons pretty much just do their thing. The humans may work hard, spend a lot of money to transport the pigeons to a race location, and train them to come home to the right loft, but the pigeons simply follow the natural urge to return. Meanwhile, the pigeon fanciers get caught up in the excitement of wanting to win. The film plays up the contrast, showing various moments where the pigeon fanciers express an intense desire for their bird to win and cheer when they near the finish line, while the pigeons are indifferent to any desire for speed, never rushing to make it inside the loft once they arrive there. The humans focused on in the film have strong personalities, but the pigeons shown appear to go with the flow of whatever situation they happen to be in at a given moment, unbothered by the other pigeons around them, nor expressing aggression towards each other.
This is all very amusing, and at first, the film presents pigeon racing as simply a quirky sport that cannot be fully explained with logic. One interview subject states that humans don’t even know why pigeons have homing instincts or how they navigate the world, so the fact that humans can train them at all is not fully explained. On the one hand, it invites us to appreciate something that is still somewhat mysterious to humankind, but the omission of any explanation, written off by just one subject, may cause some to wonder if that mystery really is true. Others might be happy to sit with the mystery of it, as the film intends, appreciating that not everything needs an explanation. The fascination with pigeons is not something that many would find easy to explain, and the film’s focus on the pigeon fanciers and pigeons, not the reason for their homing phenomenon, reflects that, having fun with exploring something so remote from many of our lives.
As the film continues, however, it begins to explore the sport’s dark side. As one might expect from a sport that provides an opportunity for big payouts, greed and prestige are a factor in pigeon racing. The head organizer of one of the most prestigious races in the world, the South African Million Dollar Pigeon Race from which the film takes inspiration for its title, is determined to maintain the race’s reputation. She is so determined that she makes multiple decisions that ultimately result in a disaster. Pigeons are lost, as well as funds that were supposed to be distributed to the winners of the race. When participants complain, she refuses to take accountability for her negligence and ceases communications with them and the filmmakers. Million Dollar Pigeons is revelatory about the sport of pigeon racing, and portrays pigeons as more interesting animals that most of us would expect them to be, but the behaviour of those in power at this South African race are sadly too predictable. Just like powerful people in many other contexts in the past, some of those in pigeon racing also dislike taking responsibility for, or even acknowledging, what is clearly their fault.
Despite this detour into tragedy and mismanagement, the film otherwise gives more weight to the positive side of the industry. There are moments where the film lightly touches on the ways that pigeons might not always be as well-treated as they could be. During a somewhat lengthy scene featuring a veterinarian, the vet mentions briefly that not everyone vaccinates their pigeons, which results in disease outbreaks in race lofts. There is also one brief shot of a crate full of pigeons getting lightly jostled as it is moved onto a truck. But other than these few moments, the film pays more attention to those who treat their pigeons well. The veterinarian is shown dutifully helping multiple pigeon owners from all over the world care for their birds. More than once we see pigeon owners just as dutifully scrape muck from pigeon coupes. Pigeons are handled in very precise and careful ways at auctions. We see all the ways that a pigeon race organizer in Asia ensures that his facilities are the cleanest and that employees treat the pigeons staying there in the best way possible. If there are people who deviate from this, they are largely unacknowledged by the documentary.
It could be, perhaps, that Fitzgerald doesn’t want the film to be too dark and to remain hopeful that the sport of pigeon racing involves many people who do care about animal welfare, like most of the film’s subjects do. Or perhaps Fitzgerald is so taken by the discovery of this entertainingly quirky sport that some flaws are overlooked. Either way, it still leaves the audience to wonder if what the film presents is indeed the full story. Other than a few individual instances of inattentiveness, there is no suggestion that any pigeons are subject to abuse or deliberate injury, either by their owner or by competitors. Most of us know that greed and humane treatment of animals (or humans, for that matter) don’t always go hand in hand, yet the documentary doesn’t suggest that this is a big problem within the pigeon racing community. Any instances of negligence are presented as aberrations. It is likely that the people involved in the documentary are the types of people who care about treating their birds fairly, whereas those who don’t also wouldn’t want to be recorded on film. But it comes across as a bit of a blind spot not to find some way to get subjects of the film to answer to the possibility that not everyone treats their birds as well as they do. At the very least, finding some way to directly address this question would have been informative about the culture of pigeon racing beyond what we already see in the film.
In the end, the fact that this documentary doesn’t move in that direction suggests that that is not its intention at all, but instead simply to give its audience a different point of view on pigeons and their perceived value in the world. Admittedly, both introducing an audience to an unfamiliar subject and probing it deeply from multiple angles would be a lot for just one feature-length doc. But by shedding a light on people who are fascinated by pigeons, we get to think about those everyday birds in a new way. For the film’s premiere at the festival, the screening was followed by a release of live homing pigeons outside the theatre. Even people in attendance who don’t usually like seeing pigeons found themselves getting excited to watch them fly. This interest in pigeons appears to be the film’s true end goal, to see them beyond the stereotype of “winged rats” and the idea that people who like them are losers with no lives outside of a few minutes on a park bench.
While the critique of the pigeon racing industry’s flaws feels incomplete, Million Dollar Pigeons is still an entertaining journey and effective in opening your eyes to something new beyond what assumptions you might already have. If you’re like me, you might see pigeons on the street and start to think about how the humble pigeon is simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary. That contradictory nature parallels the industry at the documentary’s centre as well as the documentary itself, which is partly an investigation into the good and bad of pigeon racing, but mostly just an exploration of the delights to be found in it. Pigeon racing is simultaneously big business and niche, hidden from our view, just like pigeons’ extraordinary abilities, but an entertaining spectacle if you find it. It is a reminder of the worlds of strangeness and wonder hidden in unexpected, and typically overlooked, places.
