Around 1,000 Amsterdam city pigeons are being processed into paté every year, without officials knowing about it, the Parool reports on Wednesday.

A private pest control firm kills around 1,000 pigeons a year on behalf of private firms and home owners and delivers to them to a city poulterer, who turns them into ‘game paté’, the paper says.

Pigeons are nicknamed ‘flying rats’ in the Netherlands and have a reputation for eating whatever they can.

Amsterdam poulterer Thomas van Meel told the Parool he turns ‘a couple of hundred’ into paté every year but is not worried about the health implications. ‘We carry out very tight screening on everything that comes in,’ he is quoted as saying.