For many Pittsburgh residents, the brutal Labor Day pigeon shoots in Hegins, Pa., are perhaps a distant memory. But this brutal "sport" is still very much legal in Pennsylvania.

Andrew D. Blechman is the author of "Pigeons--The Fascinating Saga of the World's Most Revered and Reviled Bird" and lives in Massachusetts (www.andrewblechman.com).

Thankfully, legislation -- which was blocked from a vote this year despite having enough support to pass -- is expected to be reintroduced next month. One hopes it will finally be given a fair shake, and at long last the state can put its reputation for permitting animal cruelty to rest.

While some communities hold bake sales and barbecues to raise money, Hegins slaughtered pigeons. After more than six decades of bloodshed, the shoot was finally closed down in 1999 after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unanimously ruled that humane officers could prosecute participants for animal cruelty. In its opinion, the court characterized these competitions as "cruel and moronic."

But unlike just about every other state in the union, Pennsylvania still permits live pigeon shoots, and these events remain popular at rural gun clubs across the state. I should know; I participated in one while researching a book.

Participants target living creatures with shotguns rather than catapulting clay discs. And instead of these discs littering the field, the ground is saturated with thousands of dead and dying birds -- more than 70 percent of which are not killed outright by shooters. "Survivors" are scooped up by young boys paid to stuff them into plastic garbage bags where the birds suffocate with hundreds of other dead and dying birds. They are then burned in bonfires or sold to rendering plants.

To supply the shoots, poachers capture city birds by the van load and sell them to middlemen for whatever the market will bear -- usually a couple of bucks apiece. I visited one of these brokers at his cabin alongside Interstate 78. His backyard was filled with pigeons crowded into cages, awaiting their fate as shotgun fodder at the next regional shoot. As you can imagine, they were not particularly well cared for.

Although animal-rights activists in those parts are usually viewed with suspicion, one Lackawanna County town recently joined forces with the Humane Society and filed an injunction to stop a planned shoot in Covington Township. Many officials there didn't even know such events existed, but now alerted to the fact, they are actively working to ban them in their municipality.

Pigeon shoots as sport in America date back to the 1830s. They were imported from England, where the landed gentry enjoyed the expensive challenge of live target practice. Early targets included blackbirds, purple martins, sparrows and bats, but trapshooters eventually settled on the docile passenger pigeon as the target of choice because they were plentiful and easy to capture. This popularity helped lead to the bird's rapid extinction, and the common street pigeon, also known as the Rock Dove, took its place.

Pigeon shoots were popular enough to support a professional class of marksmen who toured the country with well-attended expositions and vaudeville shows. The sport's golden moment was the Paris Olympics of 1900, where it was a medal competition. But public outcry led by humane societies doomed the sport to just one Olympic showing and quickly drove the sport underground back home. Live pigeons gave way to clay and tar discs, though the king of machismo himself, Ernest Hemingway, still gleefully targeted pigeons when he lived in Cuba.

With the stain of blood expunged from the sport, trapshooting regained its reputation as a wholesome competitive sport. And whether you embrace sport hunting or not, it has earned a legitimate place in our nation's history and cultural landscape. But shooting live animals for target practice is somehow different, and many traditional hunters also oppose it.

Today's pigeon shooters remain a varied bunch. Many are rural white males who resent "animal nuts" and "liberal elitists" threatening their traditions. But, surprisingly, at the shoot I attended, the parking lot was filled with Mercedes and BMWs driven by lawyers and businessmen visiting from big cities. What they all hold in common is a view that pigeons are vermin, and that they are doing humanity a service by killing them.

In reality, the pigeon has phenomenal athletic abilities and an unparalleled history. Pigeons are the world's oldest domesticated bird -- Noah's dove was a pigeon. They have been utilized by every major historical superpower from ancient Egypt to the United States of America. It was a pigeon that delivered the results of the first Olympics in 776 B.C. and a pigeon that first brought news of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo more than 2,500 years later. Nearly a million pigeons served in both World Wars and are credited with saving thousands of soldiers' lives.

For its part in sponsoring live pigeon shoots, Hegins earned the moniker "Cruelty Capital of the World." I suspect Pennsylvania residents would prefer not to have that nickname associated with the state at large. While the pigeons awaiting slaughter in Covington Township have been granted a temporary reprieve, you can be sure they soon will be shipped out as fodder for another competition -- unless Pennsylvanians ban the sport altogether. I would urge residents to let their state representatives know where they stand on this issue and insist the ban finally be put to a vote.