I consider my experiences of and with rats to have been fairly average. The one exception involved the Karni Mata temple in Rajasthan, India, where I once joined Hindu pilgrims as they paid their devotional respects to the great many thousands of rats that are the temple’s special, and sacred, attraction.

This memorable occasion aside, I remember as a child feeding the mischiefs of semi-wild rats that roamed the streets and squares of Valletta. When the handouts ran out I would chase them, endlessly fascinated by their dogged ability to go about their daily business on the streets as humans went about theirs.

Some years later I often found myself spending my lunch breaks at Barrakka gardens, where rats were plentiful. One of the pleasures of the place was to watch their elaborate courtship displays. The males would make funny noises and perform little circular dances as they vied for the attention of females. They were the reason why I usually got back to work late.

If I sound ridiculous, I’m in good company. Under pressure to explain the culling of pigeons in his village the other day, a Balzan local councillor produced the old chestnut that pigeons are ‘flying rats’. By which he meant that they are vermin, and as undesirable as the unfeathered variety.

Except they aren’t. The facts that their droppings are unnice, and that they potentially carry diseases, are of no consequence. Cats destroy wildlife, rip sofas and curtains to ribbons, walk on people’s faces in the middle of the night, and have been known to carry diseases. Yet I wouldn’t recommend describing them to a cat lover (I’m one, so I would know) as vermin. I think they might get upset, homicidal, if you went on to say that cats should be shot on sight.

I’m saying that the people who describe pigeons as flying rats, and especially the councillors who hire people to shoot them, are a gormless bunch who have no understanding of the relations between people and animals.

Let’s leave aside two things. First, the small matter of priorities. It was good to see that the Balzan (and Cospicua and Sliema) local councils had finally figured out that pigeons were the single most pressing local environmental issue. Forget the destruction of orange groves, the mauling of historic façades and the forests of tower cranes – it was pigeons whodunit.

Second, the equally trivial matter of animal welfare. Now I know that a few extra bloodied feathers won’t matter in a grand scheme of things that includes supermarket shelves stocked with thousands of avian pectoral muscles known as chicken breasts, but that isn’t the point really. Animal welfare arguments cannot depart from statistical significance.

Pigeons are a breed apart. They are feral, and they rather like to set up home in cities and village cores

The thing with pigeons is, they’ve taken to sharing our habitat with us. On the one hand, all feral pigeons are descendants of, indeed are the same species as, wild birds called Rock doves (Columba livia). Many of them are practically impossible to tell, plumage-wise, from the wild kind. Which is why feral pigeons were listed in Birdlife’s Malta Breeding Bird Atlas as a fully-fledged species of breeding bird.

That said, pigeons are a breed apart. They are feral, and they rather like to set up home in cities and village cores. That means that our relations with them tell us a lot about how we relate to our built environment.

That much they share with rats, among other animals, but no one would spend hours watching rats at Barrakka, or feeding them scraps of food. (The Hindu temple doesn’t count – by definition, religion is not normal life.) The point is that pigeons are part of our daily lived experience of the city.

Following that logic, I am not too surprised at the attempts to clear the streets of pigeons. They are simply the latest instalment in a series that includes children playing, hawkers, and stray dogs and cats.

Benjamin Zepheniah is a British Jamaican writer and poet. He tells of how, growing up in Birmingham in the 1960s, he would often be harassed by police simply for hanging out. The idea was that one had no business being on the streets for no apparent reason, and that it was the job of the police to clear the streets of the undesirables who did just that.

One of the perennial headaches of upwardly-mobile people in Mumbai involves beggars, hawkers, urchins (homeless children are called that in India) and such. Their presence on the streets is thought to dash middle-class aspirations. Every so often the police set about removing undesirables from the streets; the ‘anti-beggar drives’ are as spectacular as they are heartbreaking to watch.

These two examples are relevant to Malta, not so much because of the presence on the streets of British Jamaican poets and Indian urchins. (The Prime Minister has vowed to clear Marsa of the job-hunting asylum seekers who hang out there, but never mind). Rather, they are examples of how cities and especially city streets are systematically sanitised.

Readers who remember The Beatles or so will also remember that streets used to be much busier places. I should probably say more diverse and colourful ones, given the number of cars we live with nowadays. Old photographs show spaces that bustled with animals, hawkers, children playing, and so on. One can only begin to imagine the sounds and the smells they produced.

Most of that would be considered unbearable today. As in 1960s Birmingham and contemporary Mumbai, the drift of urban design is to sanitise the streets and rid them of everything except palm trees in plastic pots, and street furniture straight out of a parking lot in Croydon.

My advice to pigeons is twofold. First, and much as I would miss them, to rediscover their roots and migrate to the sea cliffs where their ancestors once lived. Second, not to take it personally: if we could banish hawkers and children, we would.

mafalzon@hotmail.com