She said some birds do not die instantly when shot and instead get startled in the dark and collide with things, but Pellen said that was “not true at all”.<\/p>\n
“You just have to shoot them in the head,” he said.<\/p>\n
He added that “good pest controllers always, always kill them in a humane manner”.<\/p>\n
A Network Rail spokesperson said it was “no secret” that many railway stations provided “attractive homes” to the birds.<\/p>\n
They said a variety of deterrents, including spikes and vapour-releasing gel pods to discourage roosting, were used as a first port of call.<\/p>\n
“A decision to cull pigeons is only taken as a last resort, where all other options have been exhausted,” they added.<\/p>\n
As of December, Northern had stopped carrying out culls at stations, and has more recently stopped at its depots too.<\/p>\n
South Western Railway said it had not ordered any shootings since March 2026, and egg removal was carried out instead if possible.<\/p>\n
All state-owned operators in the UK were sent the request for information in April except Govia Thameslink Railway, which had not yet gone into public ownership.<\/p>\n
London Northwestern Railway and West Midlands Railway services were also only renationalised in February 2026.<\/p>\n
Transport for Wales said it did not hold data for cullings, other than 41 pigeons were shot at its stations in the final months of 2026.<\/p>\n
Transpennine Express and Southeastern have not responded to the request.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"She said some birds do not die instantly when shot and instead get startled in the dark and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":708528,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-708527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/708527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=708527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/708527\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/708528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=708527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=708527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=708527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}