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India's police pigeon service started in 1946. For more than fifty years, police stations in Orissa,
an area in eastern India, used pigeons to deliver important messages to each other.
Every day until 1988, they tied messages to pigeons' legs and sent them off across the Indian countryside.
However, as technology improved,
more and more police stations decided to start using radio and telephone communication instead.
It looked like the pigeons would soon be out of a job.
In 1999, after a terrible storm,
the radio and telephone networks in the area were destroyed and nobody could communicate with each other.
The police needed to send messages asking for help, so they let the pigeons do the job.
Thousands of lives were saved as a result of the messages delivered by the pigeons.
Unfortunately, three years later, the Orissa police pigeon service was closed.
Costing the equivalent of 300,000 baht a year, they said it was too expensive to continue running the service.