Today, pigeons have made themselves feel at home in the cities like New York, but they actually belong to the seaside cliffs in the rest of the world where they were domesticated thousands of years ago. They were farmed for protein at first, like chicken. Then they were bred as messengers. Around the 16th century, pigeons became show birds because of the hobbyists. And when Europeans moved to North America in the same century, they brought pigeons with them. To cut it short, the link between humans and pigeons goes way back.
