Back in high school, I used to help my best friend work at his parent's restaurant so he could finish up sooner and we could hang out. I didn't get paid except in food, but he'd usually cover me if we went to the movies or an arcade or something.

Anyway, one Saturday morning we'd just finished a supply run and I was waiting by his car in the back alley while he was finishing up inside. A bit further down the alley from where I was waiting was an enormous throng of pigeons feasting on slop in and around the dumpsters in the alley.

As I watched, a dump truck entered the alley. The truck stopped just short of the throng and the driver did everything in his power short of getting out of his truck in order to disperse the crowd of pigeons. He honked his horn, he revved the motor of the garbage truck threateningly. The pigeons just went about their business heedless of the noise. Eventually the driver of the garbage truck could wait no more, so he started to creep forward, deeper into the alley.

I stood there and watched in horror as countless pigeons, who had every opportunity to fly away, were run over one after the other by a huge and very slow moving dump truck. POP! POP! POPOPOP! they went. Like wet paper lunchbags blown full of air.

They did nothing more to avoid their fate than lazily walk kind of away from the danger in an incredibly half assed fashion. Most just ignored the truck entirely. I saw at least two particularly ambitious pigeons grudgingly flap away from the truck at the last instant, only to get run over seconds later because they apparently couldn't be bothered to move any more. They'd run out of motivation.

It was one of the most horrifying things I'd seen in my life, and yet it wasn't as gory a scene as you might think because just as soon as the truck passed, the surviving pigeons thronged over the bodies of their dead companions to vie for their entrails.