Torn from today’s headlines is a story that captures the paranoia of our turbulent times: A foreign refugee fleeting a disease-ravaged land who must be stopped before he wreaks destruction across an entire continent — or is he?
“He” is Joe, a racing pigeon from Alabama who disappeared from an event in Oregon and turned up in a backyard in Melbourne, Australia. How did he get there? Did he fly? Stow away on a ship? Was he gripping a coconut by the husk?
Concerned about the disease risk, Australian authorities made a grim decision: Joe had to die. An Australian official summarized Joe’s plight in a somber and dignified manner:
But wait! Just as all seemed lost, as Joe was choosing bird seed or breadcrumbs for his last meal, as he could feel the cold, icy talon of death closing around his neck, came stunning news: Joe was not a foreign invader after all! (Something he probably could have told us if he wasn’t, you know, a pigeon.)
But wait again! If this isn’t the pigeon from Alabama who escaped in Oregon — then where’s the real Joe? Did he flee to Canada? Into the wilderness? Or is he out there, somewhere, snapping up counterfeit leg bands to raise an army of killer pigeons, spreading disease and communism to the four corners of the Earth?
Before and after pets, animal art, dog and raccoon, and pigeon gets a blow-dry 
