by johnnymarin | Oct 29, 2017 | Pigeon Patrol's Services
Camrose City council is taking another look at urban chickens and if the cluck is worth the considerable buck.
Several councillors noted they have received multiple inquiries regarding the city’s regulations on raising egg-layers in their back yard. Urban chickens are a trend that has grown in recent years with more and more communities bringing in pilot projects. Currently in Camrose, chickens still fall under the banner of livestock and are not allowed in city limits.
Before the city goes too far down the path, however, they want to check into health and safety concerns to determine if it is something they would even want in town.
“I don’t want to build up false hope,” said Mayor Norm Mayer, who asked for more investigation on the matter before the City takes further steps like community consultation and open houses.
There have been similar inquires in the past that have been rejected, like housing racing pigeons in the city. Pigeons also came with the added complication that they still have the ability to fly and are not 100 per cent of the time locked down.
There are concerns regarding backyard poultry such as noise, smell and animal welfare monitoring systems along with regulations regarding coops and other matters.
Urban chicken programs are often seen as a positive educational tool for families with children, or as a means of ensuring eggs are coming from a humanely treated animal on a grass-fed diet with lots of room to roam, as opposed to a factory bird.
Depending on the type of pilot project brought in, there are different costs associated. Director of planning and development services Aaron Leckie brought up a few different examples of pilot projects during the meeting of a whole on Sept. 18. He pointed to the project in St. Albert which runs at an administrative and policy cost of about $15,000 a year, and that’s before the cost of labour for monitoring and bylaws and other departments is taken into account. He says it could cost as much as $45,000 combined a year.
The total was an amount council balked at.
“The cost you outlined, I would think we’d have to have the goose that laid the golden egg, that’s quite a high figure,” said Coun. Max Lindstrand, before later adding that if pilot project could be formed that was close to cost neutral or would hit the purse strings less, it is something he would be willing to look at.
Leckie said there were currently backyard operations currently running in Camrose, but they are completely without regulation or approval, noting there are stores in town that sell laying hens and supplies but they are not all to county residents.
He said they often find out through word of mouth or from new residents who phone in looking for rules and regulations in the city regarding backyard hens.
“We tell them you can’t actually have them in the city and that’s usually when they say ‘Goodbye’ and we never hear from them again,” he said.
“They are not being monitored in anyway … unless there’s been a registered complaint.”
About Pigeon Patrol:
Pigeon Patrol Products & Services is the leading manufacturer and distributor of bird deterrent (control) products in Canada. Pigeon Patrol products have solved pest bird problems in industrial, commercial, and residential settings since 2000, by using safe and humane bird deterrents with only bird and animal friendly solutions. At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.
Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products four years in a row.
Contact Info: 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD (www.pigeonpatrol.ca)
by johnnymarin | Oct 28, 2017 | Pigeon Patrol's Services
Actor turned director Soubin Shahir’s Parava focus mainly on two young boys from Mattanchery in Kochi, whose lives revolve around the pigeons that they passionately look after.
Haseeb and Irshad are classmates and best friends, who are growing pigeons, training them to be ready for the race that happens in their area. The boys come from modest households and one of them fails in the exam. But he has hope as he believes that a newly joined girl is impressed by his charm.
It’s them, along with the lives of the people in the locality, that makes the going entertaining for a significant time in the first half.
Then there is a shift in the tale, as the story goes into a flashback mode, where Imran (Dulquer Salmaan) and Shane (Shane Nigam) takes control. Their gang is having a blast until things go horribly wrong for them at a certain point of time
In fact, you watch with a certain surprise when a smoothly running story that is fresh and honest, takes a back seat all on a sudden. The sequences that follow goes on like a separate track that is not really gripping as the earlier one.
But all these never takes away the merits of the movie. Let’s put it this way. The sequences with the two kids in the lead are so brilliant that one would have wanted to watch it for a longer duration.
Soubin Shahir packages the film with lots of confidence and he makes us feel like we belong to that area, knowing the characters well enough.
Dulquer Salmaan, in a rather extended cameo, is totally comfortable as a rustic youth and shines bright. Shane Nigam has to sport two different looks and he is highly impressive. The supporting cast has done a commendable job behaving like normal residents there and look authentic.
But Parava belongs to the two young boys Amal Shah, who plays Irshad aka Ichappi, and Govind, who comes as Haseeb. The two young actors play their role earnestly and just steals your heart with their charm. They are natural and are real talents.
Parava could have been better and some trimming would have helped as well, but has its heart at the right place even in the current form. This one has its moments and is an absolutely sincere attempt. In these times when genuine stories are a rarity, this is a step in the right direction.
About Pigeon Patrol:
Pigeon Patrol Products & Services is the leading manufacturer and distributor of bird deterrent (control) products in Canada. Pigeon Patrol products have solved pest bird problems in industrial, commercial, and residential settings since 2000, by using safe and humane bird deterrents with only bird and animal friendly solutions. At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.
Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products four years in a row.
Contact Info: 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD (www.pigeonpatrol.ca)
by johnnymarin | Oct 27, 2017 | Bird Netting
B.F. Skinner was a leading 20th-century psychologist, who is credited with helping to understand the relationship between behaviour and the external environmental factors. In one of his experiments, Skinner trained a bunch of pigeons to tap on a plexiglass to earn their food. This research is credited with the genesis for how engineers in the 21st century could play with the human mind to set out the trap of the world wide web. What Skinner managed to do with pigeons, 21st-century coders have achieved in structuring the internet.
Skinner’s experiment was simple. The psychologist set up a plexiglass cage in which he kept a few pigeons. When these pigeons tapped on the glass, he set up an arrangement to ensure that the birds got a reward after a set period of time. The birds tapped the glass at different frequencies and found success at the set moment. When he then set erratic times for the dispensing of food, the birds went crazy. Reportedly, one pigeon pecked the plexiglass 2.5 times per second for 16 hours.
But how does this apply to how humans use the internet?
Look back at how you started using the internet. It started out with checking emails. It was an easy method, you didn’t have to decipher any weird handwritings and the email, unlike written communication, almost never got lost. When the internet came into your phone from your desktop, you checked it more often. Now, the relay of messages started happening in real time on apps such as Whatsapp and Slack. A study states that an average person now checks his phone about 2,617 times a day. Of course, this isn’t just office email. But the sheer frequency indicates that things are going out of hand.
To put this in perspective, in a day, Skinner’s pigeons would have struck the glass 1,44,000 times to get food. An average millennial checks their phones at a frequency a lot similar to Skinner’s pigeons. What’s different here is that this action does not translate into an end product, that is necessary for human survival. Therefore, it’s evident, that basing the structures of the internet on Skinner’s model, was a fruitful decision indeed.
Psychologists warned us of internet addiction in 1996, three years after it was formally introduced. But is internet addiction, really the fault of those using it? Or is it simply a network constructed with the ultimate motive of entrapping and addicting its users?
In his book, “The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F**k”, a #1 New York Times Bestseller, Mark Manson brings up an important point talking about blame and responsibility. He says that while it is okay to blame someone for something, it then becomes the affected individual’s responsibility to move on. The concept is rather like the economic caveat emptor. You use something; you read something, it becomes your responsibility to deal with it in a proper way.
The Economics And Psychology Of Social Media Platforms
The primary motive of organisations on the internet is to generate revenue. And that is usually done through advertising. They create an ‘attention economy’. Now to meet their desired results, these organisations need to create a structure that makes its users return. In psychological speak, they try to create a compulsive tic to meet their needs.
This compulsive tic is generated rather easily. Most platforms on the internet, particularly social media, run on a pattern. This is because their future depends on their ability to cultivate habits of the users, and hook them onto their product. They employee people, whose primary aim is to break the user’s willpower. In particular, they use a strategy described in Nir Eyal’s book “Hooked”. As a consultant to companies in the Silicon Valley, Eyal turned his experience into a book, teaching thousands of engineers worldwide, how to create a craving in the minds of users.
This process of addiction has four simple steps – you need a trigger (something that makes you take notice or get started), an opportunity for an action that is not predictable, a reward and an investment. It must be noted here that there was one more integral part of this process that needs to be kept in mind. The investment must be gradually increased every time until the person is fully invested in the four-step process. This is when an individual gets hooked.
The easiest example of this process is Snapchat. When you open the app, the trigger awaits – a list of names who have posted snaps. Then, an opportunity for action presents itself, regarding the stories you can watch, but what a user may be able to see, is unpredictable, creating the basis for the tic. Once the stories load, comes the reward, a peek into the lives of someone else. Further, being able to reply, replay or react creates investment in the action.
Every time you open Snapchat, the same process repeats itself. Most readers would now agree, that the process has become so ingrained in our lives, that every time we pick up the phone, we reload Snapchat, looking for more stories. This is when you’re hooked. You know how apps like Instagram and Twitter take a few seconds to load when you switch them on? That’s no accident – the wait makes the reward far more appealing, leading to a rush.
Much has been said about how social media influences our emotions and the need to educate users about proper use to ward of addiction. However, we need to consider – Is it a fair fight between the users and developers? Is this not, addiction by design, a phenomenon many are under, but most do not understand?
If the there is indeed an industry that is so blatantly exploiting the tendencies of the human mind, creating platforms based on the same experiments that have gone on to help prove the effectiveness of drugs, then is it a system that is safe for approximately 7 billion people to be exposed to?
Only If We Understand The Structure, Can We Protect Ourselves Against It
In 2004, Facebook was fun. Come 2017, Facebook is an addiction. This timeline is valid for all social media platforms, maybe even for the one, you’re reading this on. They are designed to keep you addicted.
So what are the solutions? How do we ‘not get addicted’ to a technology that runs our life now? Unlike drug or alcohol addicts, we cannot abstain from the internet. Life would be too tough. Fewer and fewer jobs allow you to not be looking at a screen.
What can be done is limiting the use of the internet. More importantly, as users, it is important for us to understand its structure – to realise that it is a platform built to exploit our impulses. That perhaps can mitigate their harm.
Figuring out the exact moment of addiction is tough. What you can do, however, is try to curb your own addiction by ensuring that you limit your time on the internet. Recognise the appeal of meeting people in person, rather than following their lives online. Most importantly, teach your children the correct way to use and understand social media and the internet.
It’s understandable that tech companies would want to collaborate with marketers and make their platforms as addictive as they can. It’s their business, and they won’t want to not make profits. But as users, we need to demand a more ethical design practises the same way we demand more ethical environmental practices. In a monetary and competitive environment, sometimes change can only come from a bottom-up approach.
Steve Jobs himself has told many journalists tales of how he keeps his children away from the iPad – one of his most successful creations. Similarly, the editor in chief of Wired, a magazine that talks about technology and the internet too, keeps his children away from screens. If tech bigwigs can understand the dangers of the internet, why can’t we?
About Pigeon Patrol:
Pigeon Patrol Products & Services is the leading manufacturer and distributor of bird deterrent (control) products in Canada. Pigeon Patrol products have solved pest bird problems in industrial, commercial, and residential settings since 2000, by using safe and humane bird deterrents with only bird and animal friendly solutions. At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.
Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products four years in a row.
Contact Info: 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD (www.pigeonpatrol.ca)
by johnnymarin | Oct 26, 2017 | Bird Netting
Redbridge Council has warned that pigeon feeders face an £80 on the spot fine and a possible £2,500 trip to court.
In a statement issued on its website, the council reminded the public that giving food to birds could cause health and sanitation risks.
“If you feed pigeons, they won’t eat everything you give them and the leftovers attract rats and mice who can in turn spread diseases to humans,” a council spokesman said.
“You’re really not helping the pigeons by feeding them bread and snacks – this can actually lead to them becoming malnourished and dying due to eating food which is not their natural diet.
“Please don’t feed the pigeons.”
In April legislation came into effect to make feeding pigeons an illegal act in Ilford town centre.
A Public Space Protection Order (PSPO) – which gives authorities more powers to tackle low level anti-social behaviours such as spitting and public urination – could be used in pigeons feeding cases.
About Pigeon Patrol:
Pigeon Patrol Products & Services is the leading manufacturer and distributor of bird deterrent (control) products in Canada. Pigeon Patrol products have solved pest bird problems in industrial, commercial, and residential settings since 2000, by using safe and humane bird deterrents with only bird and animal friendly solutions. At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.
Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products four years in a row.
Contact Info: 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD (www.pigeonpatrol.ca)
by johnnymarin | Oct 25, 2017 | Bird Netting
Officials there reportedly are trying to be as nice as they can about reducing their numbers. They’ve built a hotel for birds. The plan: lure the pigeons there to nest, and then steal their eggs.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning. I’m David Greene. Portugal has a pigeon population problem. And The Wall Street Journal reports officials in Lisbon are trying to be as nice as they can about reducing their numbers. They have built basically a luxury hotel for birds. The plan – lure the pigeons there to nest, then caretakers sneak in and steal their eggs. The birdhouse has fresh water, gourmet bird food, even a nursery, which makes you wonder if the pigeons are somehow outsmarting the humans here. It’s MORNING EDITION.
About Pigeon Patrol:
Pigeon Patrol Products & Services is the leading manufacturer and distributor of bird deterrent (control) products in Canada. Pigeon Patrol products have solved pest bird problems in industrial, commercial, and residential settings since 2000, by using safe and humane bird deterrents with only bird and animal friendly solutions. At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.
Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products four years in a row.
Contact Info: 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD (www.pigeonpatrol.ca)
