If you live in a big city, you might think pigeons are annoying and that they're always trying to steal your food.
While this may very well be true, pigeons do love bread and they tend to flock around in a bothersome fashion, but that doesn't mean they're useless creatures. They're capable of more than we ever knew!
Pigeons have binocular-like vision, accurately dubbed "pigeon vision," and excellent visual memories. It is because of this that they are able to be trained easily in order to spot cancer.
Pigeons' unique abilities can allow them to tell differences in paintings, read the letters of the alphabet, and can tell if it is a cat or a car.
After just 15 days of training, a number of pigeons in a 2015 study were able to decipher which patients had cancer after looking at their scans.
To test them, the pigeons were placed in a box with a touch screen monitor and a food pellet dispenser. They were shown slides of breast tissue. They used their beaks to peck a panel if they saw cancer and a different panel if they did not. They got this correct 85 percent of the time.
It is interesting to note that they struggled between determining if the tumors were malignant or benign, getting this accurate only 60 to 80 percent of the time. However, this is an issue that human pathologists also struggle with.
If you found this fact about pigeons fascinating, you will also enjoy this video about how dogs can smell cancer, and how one dog knew before his owner's doctors did!
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