Homing pigeons HOME! i.e. the only place they fly to is back home. You can’t use them to discretely send drugs to people because the destination has to have a pigeon roost which is extremely unusual nowadays and therefore is very incriminating. The easy it would work is you take a pigeon FROM the roost to the remote location, then you load it with drugs and it will fly home to its roost.
I can’t see a good use case here, but drug dealers have a large standard deviation when it comes to plan quality so I won’t say it for sure didn’t happen.
The other part is how did the police even notice and yet not find the destination roost and arrest the drug dealer? Put an air tag in the backpack and let it fly. Weird story for sure.
Agreed on why they didn’t tag it and let it go. I assume the found the bird incidentally during a drug bust.
Pigeon roosts can be surprisingly discreet in prisons, where there are often natural pigeon roosts anyway. And prisons are also where small amounts of contraband are worth using various methods like this to move them.
Drones are also effective, but prisons have been getting better at detecting and preventing drone drops. Very difficult to figure out which bird you’re supposed to shoot down though. Predatory birds can be used, but they don’t always grab the right pigeon, since you can’t train a hawk to distinguish which pigeon it should grab.
Homing pigeons HOME! i.e. the only place they fly to is back home. You can’t use them to discretely send drugs to people because the destination has to have a pigeon roost which is extremely unusual nowadays and therefore is very incriminating. The easy it would work is you take a pigeon FROM the roost to the remote location, then you load it with drugs and it will fly home to its roost.
I can’t see a good use case here, but drug dealers have a large standard deviation when it comes to plan quality so I won’t say it for sure didn’t happen.
The other part is how did the police even notice and yet not find the destination roost and arrest the drug dealer? Put an air tag in the backpack and let it fly. Weird story for sure.
Agreed on why they didn’t tag it and let it go. I assume the found the bird incidentally during a drug bust.
Pigeon roosts can be surprisingly discreet in prisons, where there are often natural pigeon roosts anyway. And prisons are also where small amounts of contraband are worth using various methods like this to move them.
Drones are also effective, but prisons have been getting better at detecting and preventing drone drops. Very difficult to figure out which bird you’re supposed to shoot down though. Predatory birds can be used, but they don’t always grab the right pigeon, since you can’t train a hawk to distinguish which pigeon it should grab.