The White Carneaux pigeons housed in this facility are obtained from Palmetto Pigeon Plant, in Sumter, South Carolina. The Palmetto Carneaux have been maintained as a closed colony for over 70 generations. The pigeons are bred primarily to be processed as “squab” for consumption; we purchase them live and house them at Carleton to be studied and maintained.
White Carneaux are of the species/order Columbia livia , and are a close relative to the rock dove. These pigeons exhibit unusual characteristics, including: monogamous mate selection, the feeding of “pigeon milk” to babies before solid foods are offered, and feeding by both parents, extremely accurate visual acuity, abilities to categorize large sets of visual stimuli, recognition of an hierarchical social dominance system, complex courtship and aggressive behaviors. The average weight of an adult pigeon is between 450 – 600 grams. Average life expectancy is between 3 – 6 years.
The specific individuals we purchase arrive when they are 6 – 12 months of age. Birds at 6 months of age are sexually mature. The birds we obtain are free of the following specific pathogens: paratyphoid, ornithosis, and tuberculosis. Salmonella (related to paratyphoid) should not be present but other bacteria could be present (such as E. coli) and so the pigeons are handled to protect humans from risks from bacteria, including E.coli and salmonella.
Pigeons have been studied in psychology as models of reward practices. It turns out that pigeons react very similarly to humans when it comes to work load, choices of schedules of work, and reactions to changes in rewards. Moreover, pigeons’ visual system and visual memory together with their propensity to work hard for rewards allow us to ask a lot of interesting cognitive and perceptual questions of birds.
The experiments conducted in Psyc 211, the learning and memory lab, start out as classical demonstrations of issues students read about in the text for the lecture part of the course, Psyc 210. It is clear that watching an animal learn how to respond, when to respond, and to attend to the environment in particular ways stamps in the phenomena that students read about. Students assess the usefulness of the laboratory component to their learning of material each year, and they indicate overwhelmingly that they find working with pigeons in the lab satisfying, enjoyable, entertaining, and very useful to learn the concepts from class.
The faculty supervisor, Julie Neiworth, has considered refinement, reduction, and replacement in her design of studies for the learning lab, and for independent studies by students working with her. In terms of refinement, pigeons are not put in studies which test issues like punishment, and they are not studied in invasive ways. By these means, the amount of pain or discomfort in research is minimal or absent. Pigeons are kept on a diet in terms of their food intake. This only occurs while they are being studied, and the pigeons under study are weighed every day and given extra food to maintain their health. This is a normal practice for pigeons in learning experiments, and it has been shown that pigeons given free food in a lab environment will actually overeat and become obese. The weight we maintain pigeons during studies, 85% of free-feeding weight, matches more closely the normal weight of a “free” pigeon who forages for food in the “wilds” of various cities.
In terms of reduction, Julie Neiworth designs her studies and her students’ to incorporate repeated measures designs — meaning that each subject serves as its own control. In this way, multiple groups of pigeons are not needed to test basic ideas, and so a minimum number of pigeons are used for research.
In terms of replacement, Julie Neiworth and students in the lab regularly try out Sniffy the virtual rat, which is a program designed to allow students to train and study learning phenomena in a computerized rat rather than study live animals. Students each year are asked to conduct studies using Sniffy at the same time they are conducting studies with live pigeons, and they evaluate the merits of each practice. We have found that, while the students find Sniffy to be entertaining, they soon discover that the virtual rat’s behavior does not conform to natural-occurring behavioral phenomena well, and they are extremely limited to ask any original questions about learning or memory or perception using the virtual rat.
Return to Species Specific Training: Pigeons.