Getting Back to Our First Interest

As Printed in the May 1 2009 issue of the Racing Pigeon Digest

Written By and displayed on our website courtesy of:

 Dave Clegg

Clegg and Son Loft
cleggw2gs@netzero.net

 

 

     We’ve recently witnessed the death of a pigeon club and the near demise of a combine.  We don’t know if we’ll have enough people racing to keep our trailer on the road much longer.   Every meeting is only about surviving to race another year.  Many people are getting out of the sport, many flyers are leaving and we are not attracting new ones.  It seems no one wants to step up and help out because we fear we will be stuck with a job we can never give away. 

 

     In our meetings we argue about race schedules, loft positions, race stations and shipping costs.  We fight over constitutions, membership, voting rights and race methods.  Our clubs, which used to have a large number of members, now only have a few people at the meetings.  When we hear somebody say, “I’m done” we know that our sport is the looser because we’re not getting many new members.  We wonder why it used to be fun and now it’s not. 

 

     We remember when we first became interested in pigeons, none of these other things were even thought of, all we were interested in were the birds. In our first meetings we found mentors to teach us how to understand these wonderful creatures, how to care for them and keep them healthy.  We asked simple questions and got a variety of answers.  We looked forward to seeing the old timers lofts and hearing them tell us how they cared for their champions.   Veterans would be willing to share advice, catalogs, magazines, experience and knowledge with us.   We dreamed of becoming as good of flyers as they were. 

 

     I think what has happened is that in our club and combine meetings we have stopped talking about what we enjoy the most, which is the pigeons themselves, which was our first interest.  We spend all of our time talking about the necessities of keeping our organization alive and the problems of getting along with each other.  We’ve become selfish; we look at winning as the only reason to keep birds and our egos get in the way of having fun.  If we would go back to that first interest, which was, as we said, the pigeons, we would be more enthused about this great sport, and since enthusiasm is contagious, our clubs could prosper again