How To Raise And Train Pigeons

More than 150 titles in Barronï¿1/2s Complete Pet Ownerï¿1/2s Manuals series offer basic advice and instruction on housing, feeding, protection against disease and parasites, and caring for pets of every imaginable kind. All books are heavily illustrated with color photos and instructive line art. Here is everything bird fanciers need to know about keeping pigeons, including feeding, housing, protection against parasites, general health care, and breeding. There is also information on various members of the pigeon family, and on breeding pigeons for racing.

Why would anyone want to raise pigeons? Readers might be surprised to find out just how useful they can be. Pigeons are fast and clever fliers. During World Wars I and II, they were used as a means of communication. Today, homing pigeons, or racing pigeons, are specially bred for their great speed and homing instinct. With this fun and informative book, readers will learn what is needed to raise pigeons and learn how these intelligent birds are trained.

“An informative, well-written book on the evolution of all canids, including the wild types (wolves, coyotes, jackals, and dingoes)…Recommended.”—Choice Of the world’s dogs, fewer than two hundred million are pets, living with humans who provide food, shelter, squeaky toys, and fashionable sweaters. But roaming the planet are four times as many dogs who are their own masters—neighborhood dogs, dump dogs, mountain dogs. They are dogs, not companions, and these dogs, like pigeons or squirrels, are highly adapted scavengers who have evolved to fit particular niches in the vicinity of humans. This book present an eye-opening analysis of the evolution and adaptations of these unleashed dogs and what they can reveal about the species as a whole. Exploring the natural history of these animals, canine behavior experts Raymond and Lorna Coppingers explain how the village dogs of Vietnam, India, Africa, and Mexico are strikingly similar. These feral dogs, argue the Coppingers, are in fact the truly archetypal dogs, nearly uniform in size and shape and incredibly self-sufficient. Drawing on nearly five decades of research, they show how dogs actually domesticated themselves in order to become such efficient scavengers of human refuse. The Coppingers also examine the behavioral characteristics that enable dogs to live successfully and to reproduce, unconstrained by humans, in environments that we ordinarily do not think of as dog friendly. A fascinating exploration of what it actually means, genetically and behaviorally, to be a dog, What Is a Dog? is likely to change the way beagle or bulldog owners reflect on their four-legged friends.