What happens if humans eat street pigeons after Chinese restaurant closed down for selling them as 'roasted duck'

Ever wondered what would happen to your body if you decided to tuck into a street pigeon for your dinner?

Probably not, but it's a question diners at Madrid's Jin Gu Chinese restaurant would've been wondering after finding out the eatery's 'roast duck' was actually coming from pigeons picked off the street.

No, we're not making this up, as police recently raided the restaurant in the Spanish capital's Usera district and made the pretty grim discovery of bowls full of plucked and cooked pigeon, illegal sea cucumbers and strips of meat strung up on clothes horses.

If that's not enough to put you off, local media reported that broken freezers filled with undated meat and cockroaches scuttling about the kitchen floor.

Plucked and cooked street pigeons were recovered by police (Policia Muncipal de Madrid)

Which is enough to make you consider eating home-cooked meals for the rest of your life.

If you've been able to make it to this point without being sick, congratulations, as we're about to explore what happens to the body when you consume a street pigeon.

Can humans eat street pigeons?

Like eating roadkill, eating street pigeons is typically frowned upon, but why?

The main concern associated with consuming pigeons are whether or not the birds could be carrying disease.

According to Intergum Services, feral pigeons can carry up to '60 different varieties of pathogens at a time', these include E. coli, Salmonella and plenty of other diseases which will leave you feeling under the weather or experiencing an upset stomach.

The British Pest Control Association (BPCA) adds that 49 percent of street pigeons are likely to carry a disease which can be passed onto humans.

While the above guidelines note that transmission of infection from pigeon to human is via their droppings, with particles being inhaled once the droppings dry out.

Don't eat us (Getty Stock Images)

Although we'd imagine the same applies to eating infected birds.

But this isn't to say that humans cannot under any circumstance consume a pigeon should they wish. In fact squab, which is the meat from young pigeons, is actually considered a delicacy in several countries around the world.

According to The Spruce Eats, the meat has a rather 'gamey flavour' and has been compared to ducks, which explains how the Madrid eatery were able to pass pigeon meat off as duck.

However the key difference is that restaurants and farms offering up squab aren't getting the meat from the pigeons wandering the streets. The meat comes from farm-raised birds or wood pigeons, which you'd hope wouldn't be carrying the same illnesses which their street-based counterparts are.

So in a nutshell, humans can eat pigeons — just not the ones which congregate in parks or on your roof.