The chicken or the egg (24-04-24)
Usually a ten-minute chat is enough to be able to say whether someone has talent as a fancier or whether he is a fiddler and will remain so. You can give the last one your best pigeons, they won't perform.
Those people don't see it, keep making the same mistakes.
Perhaps the most common mistake is misuse of medications.
Fortunately, many of these men continue to enjoy pigeons, despite so many 'setbacks'. 'Setbacks' in quotation marks, because they rarely are. They are the consequences of own mistakes made earlier. On the other hand, there are the men who raced well from the moment they started with pigeons.
They do have 'it'.
It has to be said that you can sometimes be wrong in your judgment.
I did that especially with Bart when he came to say that he, like his father, was going to race pigeons. 'Too bad, but that you will fail', it crossed my mind.
GOOD SIGN
His start was promising. I had to select the pigeons and although I can't pick out the good ones either, the opposite is easier: Pointing out the junk.
I tried to do so, with the result that there were few left. Then you expect a disappointed beginner, but nothing of it.
It was a beginner who knew his place, who wanted to listen to good advice and did not come up with excuses not to have to remove the selected rubbish. Usually such an excuse is the pedigree/origin, the price, you know that.
Anyway, to make a long story short; The ex-baker didn't become a loser or a gray mouse, I had misjudged him.
Visitors all the time is the price for success !!!
WELL
Whether you are dealing with 'a fast learner' is often noticed by the questions someone asks. One of the reasons why fanciers quit is not being able to win a prize.
And not being able to win a prize is often the ultimate result of improper use of medicines.
I was asked several times by people what kind of medicines they should buy when they would start with pigeons.
"None at all," I would reply.
Maybe not good for my credibility, but it was sincere.
It must be said that medicines and cures were precisely those subjects that fascinated me in my early years.
EARLIER
Learning, or learning more, about medicine became almost obsessive.
I couldn't open a pigeon magazine without looking in reports for the subheading 'medical guidance'. Especially in Die Brieftaube, a German pigeon magazine.
Because the idea that you can't do without medicine in pigeon sport was so deeply ingrained in (many) Germans. Germans who came here to buy pigeons (you do not see them any more in Holland or Belgium) often had two main questions:
-'Welche Rasse haben Sie?' (What strain do you have?) and
-'Was gibst du den Tauben?' (What extra stuff do you give your birds?).
I spent countless hours reading about diseases and medicines. It did diminish when I became close with the Janssens and Klak and never saw anything but 'very healthy' pigeons. But words like 'trichomones' they did not understand.
LEARN
After fairly well-known veterinarians let slip that pigeons were hardly or not at all mentioned in their training, I accidentally came into contact with scientists who were interested in pigeons.
It was in the days when pigeons still had reasonable economic importance, which became less so as the fancier base dwindled.
That was also the reason why Janssen pharmaceuticals stopped marketing medicines such as spartrix, spartakon and so on.
I knew the scientist who was in charge of pigeons reasonably well, as well as Dr. Lemahieu. An authority with whom H v B and I chatted for many hours about health problems in pigeons. If they were so big that no vet could help you, he was there.
CONTACTS
Prof van Grembergen, the man of the yellow drops, was a fan of my articles.
I had good contacts with him as well as with 'big shots' in the field of pigeon medicine at the University of Ghent. Dr. Devrieschere was one of the greatest.
Dr. Stam was also regularly called on. As avid smokers, we had found each other in Tokyo, Olympiad 1981.
Dr. Stam was, I think, the first Dutchman to bring Suanovil to the attention. Older Dutch people may still remember his 's and a powder'. (Suanoviland Aureomycin).
I once heard something so bizarre from someone from the University of Ghent that it was stored in the deepest caverns of my memory.
The scientist interested in pigeons: 'Pigeon fanciers have to be careful with cures. Pigeons get the diseases they are most often cured against.'
PRACTICE
When fanciers talk about medicines, it is often about 'clear heads'. In other words: Respiratory problems.
And where do you mainly see those problems? There! In the areas where they medicate most. It's a similar story in Germany.
We all want 'super pigeons' and knowing that they don't bring them to us, W de Bruijn and me could regularly find ourselves in the lofts of leading 'Flemings'. Some were candid and guess what? Almost all of them cured against coccidiosis. That turned out to be necessary, because almost all of them had pigeons that suffered from it.
'They had to take a cure. "But... Was that because of sick pigeons or did pigeons get sick easily because of all the cures they had before?'
I still doubt the answer. The chicken or the egg.
Incidentally, the fear of antibiotics is now well established worldwide and one after the other is being withdrawn from the market.
EDIFYING STORY
Let's call those antibiotics AB. Mr. AB.
And all those pathogens, we're going to call Pat Hogeen.
A clash between the two, AB and Pat was inevitable
AB hit his opponent so strongly that he knocked back style. Stone-dead. Or so they thought, because after some time Pat scrambled to his feet, very shaken.
A little later, he received another blow from AB.
Again he went down, but again he recovered. Now even a little faster.
AB could not stop beating Pat Hogeen until the moment came that Pat didn't go down anymore and could stay upright.
He shook himself like a dog coming out of the water, straightened up, and now it was Pat who struck a sledgehammer blow.
And this was a good one. AB barely managed to get back on his feet.
(It is not forbidden to read this phrase twice)
These birds are in good shape