Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings April 2014, Volume 27, Number 2 | Page 103

than the pigeon, which could be cooked like chicken, then a
semi-luxury dish. But it was the railroad and telegraph, which
began to spread across the landscape in the 1830s and 1840s,
that proved lethal to the species.
Previously, hunters’ inability to predict where passenger pigeons would nest in a given year protected the creatures. With
the telegraph, however, the news of a major nesting could move
at the speed of light. With the railroad, market hunters could
converge in a few days and then send the slaughtered pigeons
to market. And slaughtered they were. Greenberg quotes one
pigeoner at the great Wisconsin nesting of 1872 attacking the
departing males in the morning.
Hundreds, yes thousands, dropped in the open fields below.
. . . The slaughter was terrible beyond any description. Our
guns became so hot by rapid discharges we were afraid to load
them. . . . Below the scene was truly pitiable. Not less than
2,500 birds covered the ground.

Having killed as many of the males as they could, the hunters moved in on the females and the squabs, who, unable to fly
yet, were easy pickings. Greenberg reported one estimate that
at least a hundred barrels, each holding 300 birds, were shipped
daily during the 40 days that the hunt lasted. That doesn’t count
the birds shipped alive, consumed locally, or just left to rot. Nor
does it count the myriad squabs that starved to death in the
nests because their parents had been killed.
Besides guns, nets were used. Designed like vast mouse traps,
they would be baited with corn and other grains and with tame
birds to lure the wild ones. (This was the origin of the term “stool
pigeon” because the birds were tethered to a small platform
called a stool.) When enough birds had gathered, the trap would
be sprung and snapped over the victims. The catch would be
enormous. One spring of a trap in Wisconsin yielded 35,000
birds. A three-man team in 1878 netted more than 50,000 birds
during the hunting season.
With this sort of predation, the number of passenger pigeons
declined rapidly. As it did so, the market hunters converged on
the remaining flocks, and the population crashed. By the 1890s,
the flocks were too scattered and too few to be worth pursuing
anymore. By that time it was too late. The last definite specimen
to be shot in the wild died in 1898. The last birds seen in the
wild were observed about a decade later. By 1912, only a few
birds, all captive, remained. Will humans survive our increasing population proliferation, nuclear weapons, and our rapidly
changing environment?
WAR ON POVERTY
January 2014 was the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon
B. Johnson’s declaration of the war on poverty. As Thomas G.
Donlan writes in Barron’s, “From it came Medicare, Medicaid,
Head Start, Community Action, and many other antipoverty
programs,” numbering at least 126 (17). “The poverty rate,” as
Donlan continues, “in 1964 was 19% and in 2013, 16%.” At
that rate, Donlan calculated that the poor will still be poor in
2264. The federal and state governments’ spending amounted
to more than $16 trillion (adjusted for inflation) over 50 years.
April 2014

Did all that money improve the economic potential of the
people who live in poverty? Donlan answers “yes.” Antipoverty
spending, now about $600 billion a year in our $3.4 trillion
federal budget and another $230 billion in antipoverty spending by the states, makes life in poverty less painful than in
1964, especially for the sick, aged, and children. That money,
however, has not brought meaningful education, positive attitudes, or better employment. The amount of money that
the US has spent on fighting poverty is close to the size of the
national debt.
The amount of money spent in 2013 on fighting poverty in
the US would have been enough to send every poor person a
check for $11,000, which is the annual US measure of poverty
for an individual. Many of the 46 million people in poverty were
pushed there by sickness, so more than half of the money spent
on fighting poverty goes through the Medicaid program. Thus,
poor people in ill health would still be needy if they received an
annual check for $11,000.
Donlan indicates that the 16% poverty rate is an annual
summation, but most people become poor temporarily and
then recover. The Census Bureau indicates that nearly 32% of
the nation’s households were in poverty for at least 2 months
from 2009 through 2011. It also indicates that only 3.5% of
households were in poverty for the whole 3 years.
Surprisingly, the standard government data on the income
of people in poverty does not include the value of povertyfighting benefits, the largest of which include the food people
buy with food stamps and other food subsidies, home-heating
subsidies, the earned income tax credit, the premium for private
health insurance that would substitute for Medicaid, free and
reduced-priced school lunches, and public housing and housing subsidies.
The Census Bureau’s statisticians of poverty developed
an alternative poverty rate a few years ago that accounts for
government programs as income. It also estimates expenses
for out-of-pocket health care, work-related expenses, and
child care expenses. For 2012, the overall poverty rate was
slightly higher, 16% for the supplemental poverty measure
vs. 15.1% with the official poverty measure in 2012. The
supplemental poverty measure shows that if there were no
government programs, the US would have a poverty rate of
nearly 30%.
DEFINING “PUBLIC SERVANTS”
Peggy Noonan, who usually has a piece in Saturday editions
of The Wall Street Journal, recently had a piece on selfishness in
our political life (18). I was struck by the following paragraph:
There’s an increasing sense in our political life that in both parties politicians call themselves public