Passenger pigeons’ extreme social empathy made them an easy prey for humans

Evidence

For example, biologist Bernd Heinrich describes the fate of the passenger pigeons, whose “social sense was so strong that it drew the new predator, technologically equipped humans, from afar. It made them not only easy targets, but easily duped.” Commercial harvesters followed the pigeons’ flight and nesting patterns, and then used huge nets to catch thousands of pigeons at a time, shipping millions by rail each year to the markets from St. Louis to Boston. The harvesters used a specific technique, designed to exploit the extraordinary bonds of empathy among the birds and immortalized in the term “stool pigeon.” A few birds would be captured first and attached to a perch with their eyes sewn shut. As these birds fluttered in panic, the flock would descend to “attend to them.” This made it easy for the harvesters to “catch and slaughter” thousands at once. The last passenger pigeon died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914: “The pigeon had no home boundaries over which to spread itself and continued to orient only to itself, so it could be everywhere, even to the end.… To the pigeons, the only ‘home’ they knew was in the crowd, and now they had become victims of it… the lack of territorial boundaries of human predators had tipped the scales to make their adaptation their doom.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1487

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the passenger pigeon extinction narrative and could be linked to other readings on how social instincts become evolutionary vulnerabilities. — connects to: The human homing-to-herd instinct becomes fatal against engineered predators — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1486; Genetically evolved sentiments can motivate action against self-interest; The reflexive impulse to mirror others is part of our collective affliction — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 714 (+1 more)
• BMF: The image of birds with sewn eyes luring the flock into slaughter evokes nothing from the listed library, but recalls the trap psychology in Gulliver’s Travels-era satire more than any listed title.

Broader Connections

• The human homing-to-herd instinct becomes fatal against engineered predators #corroborates (0.82) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1486
• The reflexive impulse to mirror others is part of our collective affliction #corroborates (0.78) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 714
• Genetically evolved sentiments can motivate action against self-interest #corroborates (0.75)