Skip to footer

Honduras: Contraceptive may be handed out at Catholic church...to pigeons

Nets installed at a Honduran cathedral to keep pigeons from roosting on the historic structure were met by calls of animal cruelty. Now an environmental group suggests using contraceptive feed.

|
Jacqueline Dormer/Republican-Herald/AP
A pigeon lands on a wire to join the group of them in Frackville, Pa., in this July 12 photo.
  • By Russell Sheptak Guest blogger

There's a legal battle brewing in Tegucigalpa between the Catholic Diocese and pigeon lovers from La Casa de Noé.
 
The historic cathedral in Tegucigalpa was renovated in 2009.  At that time the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History (IHAH), as part of its mission to protect the national patrimony, installed nets designed to keep pigeons from roosting on the historic structure. Their nests damage the building, and their excrement is corrosive.
 
Now, La Casa de Noé [The House of Noah] claims that the nets are killing hundreds of pigeons, and that constitutes animal cruelty.
 
It's not just the Catholic Diocese and IHAH that want to keep the pigeons out.  The city has cut down all of the trees near the cathedral, removing nesting sites for pigeons.
 
In a solomonic decision, the director of SERNA, the natural resources and environmental ministry of the Honduran government, in decree 686-2012, ordered that the netting on the right-hand side of the cathedral be removed because it was hurting the pigeons and their decomposing bodies damaged the environment.

The problem appears to be that the mesh is too big. Pigeons can become trapped in the holes in the mesh and die there, or so the spokesperson for La Casa de Noé, Silvia Alfaro, claims.
 
When she complained to the Environmental commission and the Institute for Forestry Conservation, (ICF) they informed her that pigeons were not endangered in Honduras.
 
Why only the net covering the right hand side of the building needs to be removed is not clear, but a possible solution is: install netting with a smaller mesh, so that the pigeons cannot become trapped in the mesh. The ICF has proposed to begin feeding the existing pigeon population with contraceptive feed.
 
That would allow both the cathedral and the pigeons to peacefully co-exist. But will it satisfy La Casa de Noé?

– Russell Sheptak, the co-author of the blog Honduras Culture and Politics, specializes in the study of colonial history and economic anthropology in this little-reported corner of Central America.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Honduras: Contraceptive may be handed out at Catholic church...to pigeons
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/Latin-America-Monitor/2012/0727/Honduras-Contraceptive-may-be-handed-out-at-Catholic-church-to-pigeons
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe