Demographics

A Part of the Problem

by

John Clements

Fanciers, particularly those who are a bit older, a bit longer in the tooth, and now have grey hair, often complain that the spirit has gone out of pigeon racing. They say no one stops behind on race nights to talk to each other any more. No one really want to have a chat and things like pigeon shows no longer happen because no one want to organize them.

I have thought about this situation and the condition of the modern pigeon sport and have come to the conclusion it is part a matter of age demographics. Ninety percent of today's fanciers fall into an age range between 60 and 80 years age.  Those in this dominant spread, because they have reached a senior age, have already formed their opinions and cannot be shaken from them. Pigeon success or pigeon failure seems not to have any bearing. They are opinionated and set in their ways regardless of success or failure because they can all remember when they were once good or one had a good result. Today's older members are by and large living in the past but do not have solutions for the present.

What is actually missing in today's sport because of this dominant age spread is the force generated by youth. Every society needs and input from youth if only to either attach themselves to the learnéd out of admiration and respect in the prospect that they too may learn something to help their future or to reject because the young feel certain older fanciers have nothing to teach.   This attachment or rejection by the unbiased young is a judgment that is now missing from the pigeon scene so what we are left with is a set of elder opinionated biased people who have little or no respect for each other and more to the point, seem to have a desire to bring everyone down to a one bland level. Where the young elevated those with proven distance results perhaps to a point where they were seen to be greater than they really should, today's older fancier wants to level everyone down to a point below where they should.

This slice of youth is now missing and because of it, experienced words of wisdom are also missing, and the sport, as a consequence, no longer has fanciers who talk to each other in a generous way.  Generous conversation does not happen any more, it has been wiped out.  Of course the sport is much the worse for it. What we can do about it I am unable to think except to re-publicize in a better way the great modern British pigeons that still exist.

An example could be the few pigeons who down the years have achieved 'Certificate of Merit' performances in the NFC.  If it were possible in a world where respect is missing and excuses dominate, to have photographs of all of these pigeons with a list of their performances published in the form of a poster it would be a start. This poster could be purchased by members; it could go around all the school visits. It might regain some of the respect for those among us who have done well and achieved something. In all events a poster of these pigeons should be on display at all NFC Marking stations and at every race marking. . Perhaps we do not now have the inclination or the will to praise. We appear not to want to do this generous sort of thing for the great pigeons of our day and the recent past. . Perhaps we now resent them so much we feel it better to go abroad to complete strangers who speak a different language to buy our pigeons.

Perhaps we feel it less a threat to deal on an impersonal business footing by just buying the pigeon as an object.   If Pigeon Racing were a statistical sport like Cricket everyone would know who was the youngest person ever to win a National and establish facts such as this as historical record. In Pigeon Racing it is impossible to find out and I suspect it is impossible because the rest of us do not really want to know or would be embarrassed to know.  If we had young boys or young girls interested in pigeons that would be the sort of fact they would devour just to show how madly keen they were to emulate the achievement.