There's literally no point.
Like, humans aren't really the "smartest" animals. We're just the best at language and tool use. Other animals routinely demolish us in everythig else measured on an IQ test.
Pigeons get a bad rap at being stupid, but their brains are just different than ours. Their image and pattern recognition is so insane, they can recognize words they've never seen aren't gibberish just by letter structure.
We weren't even trying to get them to do it. They were just introducing new words and expected the pigeons to have to learn, but they could already tell despite never seeing that word before.
Why the hell are we jumping straight to human consciousness as a goal when we don't even know what human consciousness is? It's like picking up Elden Ring on whatever the final boss is for your very first time playing the game. Maybe you'll eventually beat it. But why wouldn't you just start from the beginning and work your way up as the game gets harder?
We should at least start with pigeons and get an artificial pigeon and work our way up.
Like, that old reddit repost about pigeon guided bombs, that wasn't a hail Mary, it was incredibly effective.