Have you ever noticed that there pigeons literally everywhere? In big cities and small towns, pigeons can be found all across the country. However, Texas Tech campus seems to be infested with the vermin.

Walking to class, you see bird poop. Going to the library to study, you step in bird poop. Taking an exam, you are bird poop. Besides all the excrement, pigeons can carry serious disease. Anyone remember the bird flu scare? Also, feral pigeons (city pigeons) offer little to nothing for the environment or even society for that matter. They don’t clean up after themselves. They don’t provide job security. They don’t even vote.

Personally, I don’t have a vendetta against pigeons. I think they can be a beautiful part of nature contrasting with the cityscape. However, there are a lot of them, probably too many. Here are some of my proposed methods for a necessary pigeon population reduction (possible eradication).

1. Create a biological weapon of mass destruction against the birds

This seems the easiest way. Create a toxin that only harms pigeons. Put it in a water supply. Poison thousands of pigeons easily and effectively. The only risk seems to be we get the formula wrong on the toxin and somehow create super pigeons or turn people into zombie birdman, officially heralding in the apocalypse.

2. Open the Campus to a campus-wide pellet gun tourney

Arming an entire campus population with pellet guns may be a bad idea. However, one of the many things we learned from the TV show community was that a campus-wide paintball tournament would be the literal best thing ever. Take that idea and add the end goal of killing pigeons, and boom! We have the assured destruction of the pigeon problem.

3. Hire alley cats to push the birds out of our territory

Although, this idea has the chance of backfiring. Recruiting a team of alley cats to control the population of the pigeons seems like a great idea. We run the risk of becoming overrun with alley cats. If we ask them to come in, they might not choose to leave.

4. Create a new BYOP (Bring Your Own Pigeon) Meal Plan

There is nothing a student likes more than free food. What if the campus created a meal plan where you are given free food vouchers for each pigeon you bring in for removal? We would be pigeon free within a couple weeks.

5. Turn the Entire Campus in a giant aviary

What if instead of complaining about the birds, we celebrated them! We could construct a massive cage around the entire campus! We could even import special exotic bird for everyone’s true passion of bird watching! I see it now! Come out to Lubbock and witness the world’s largest aviary called Texas Tech University! Maybe that’s a bad idea…

6. Put giant magnets around campus to confuse the bird’s natural magnetic compass

Pigeons, like most birds, are thought to use a sort of magnetic compass while they fly. This built-in compass allows them to always fly home to roost and find their way on long-distance flights. By constructing several well-placed super magnetics around campus, we could literally create a sort of no-fly zone for birds all over campus.

7. Introduce a new predatory species of bird to take out the pigeons

Imagining walking to class under the protecting gaze of hawks and falcons. These birds of prey would feast on all the pigeons which are slow easy targets to take out. However, once they have run out of pigeons and field mice to eat. We may have to be careful walking our small pets on campus.

8. Create a genetically modified pigeon that’ll slowly create an infertility crisis in the population

This is an interesting idea of capturing a couple pigeons and genetically modify them to produce only infertile males. The process may be extremely slow, but after a couple generations of infertility, the species would quickly die out with a guarantee of never resurfacing.

9. Make a new viral internet challenge where you eat a pigeon

This might be my low point of ideas, but least it is better than tide pods.

10. Try listing the birds on TTU yard sale

The internet world of online shopping and listing is a crazy one. People can list anything they want and there is always a chance for someone equally crazy to want to buy it. Who knows maybe selling off our pigeons will provide our school with enough money to lower tuition a little.

11. Donate the pigeons to other Big-12 schools

As a gift to the other Big-12 schools, we could send them a couple pigeons as a gift for winning a football game vs. out of conference teams or placing in the top 3 at a national track meet. These gifts would obviously give our school a somewhat “tarred and feathered” reputation, but at least we’d have fewer pigeons on campus.

12. Change campus parking restrictions to include “No Feathers Allowed”

All these ideas keep putting a lot of the burden on students or faculty, but what if there was another way. By changing the parking restriction, we can make our favorite TTU service department, Transportation and Parking, deal with the pigeons. Can you imagine the vines and videos of those little white parking trucks racing around trying to shoo the pigeons away!

13. Brutalize a couple pigeons and let them spread their tale

We capture a couple pigeons or even better hire some thug ones from New York. These pigeons will get roughed up a bit and then sent out to the pigeon hives. The horrifying stories will scare off tons of pigeons who aren’t brave enough to risk capture. Their stories of the terror of treatments and torture techniques may get us in trouble, but we will live in infamy forever known as Texas Tech the Guantanamo Bay for Pigeons.

14. Create a new pigeon-free brainwash class for Tech

This would be a great method! Not only would TTU make money from the class, but no pigeons actually be harmed. We would just brainwash students into thinking pigeons don’t actually exist and all the pigeons they see are just an optical illusions created by the Flat-Earth Society or Russia (choose any scapegoat really). This idea is the definition of two-birds with one stone!

15. Hire an army of drones to free the skies of pigeons

Black Mirror may actually inspire something good! Imagine the sky darkening! You hear a low humming filling the air! Has the apocalypse started? Has Gondor called for aid? No! It is an army of drones! But wait! What are they doing? They…they are shooting pigeons out of the freaking sky! Yeah, this is awesome! Wreck’em Tech!

16. Leave the campus, let the pigeons grow out of control and destroy themselves

I’m going to call this the Roman technique. Much how Rome’s rise to glory caused its downfall. The pigeons will become lazy and proud to control all of campus. They will let their guard down and slowly disintegrate from the inside. The once proud species will become lazy and overfed. They will elect stupid leaders who will destroy their society. After the pigeons have destroyed themselves, we can swoop in and resume classes as normal.

17. Lease a ton of giant speakers to blast the sound of predators

Imagine the beauty of walking to class with the screams of eagles playing on speakers. Taking a test while the roar of lions and tigers echo through the hallways. Seeing the pigeons fly with terror from our campus while an unseen foe chances them away. Obviously, we should probably do some research into the most effective predator to scare the birds away before making any anti-pigeon Spotify playlists.

18. Pray for a hailstorm of fire to eradicate the pigeons

Much like with the Hebrews, we are enslaved to the flying rats with wings. We feed them and house them free of charge. Thankfully, God will hear our cries. He will not abandon us to this fate. The day will come when there is much flapping of wings and crying of beaks. In those days, the sky will darken as ash and fire rain down to destroy our flying captors. In those days, the name of God will be shouted in triumph as we are freed from the bonds of birds forever.

19. Implement a lot of tall, mirrored wind turbines.

We all know the real-life killer of birds are wind turbines and skyscrapers. So why not put both together? We can set them up around campus to generate electricity and maybe take out a couple pigeons along the way. We know it’s going to be windy anyway. Let’s kill some pigeons while we are at it.

20. Annual Pigeon Day Purge

I can’t come up with every crazy way to end pigeon lives! However, creating a purge will definitely let the creative juices flow for from the students. Who knows? Maybe from the additional stress relief and creative ingenuity, we will see a rise in the GPA for students. Also the annual purge would probably be a great recruiting technique, but that is probably reaching out to students we might not want…