i think making the feathered dressmaker wholly explicable by something as simple as a *pun* would be a loss. if she was a pigeon, there would be a sense that you should have expected a bird to be here in the first place just because of the perfect pun that that entails. part of the joke of the feathered dressmaker, as she explicitly mentions, is that she earned honorary rat status in the exact same way we did. that would be *less* amusing if she already had Metaphorical Rat Status as an excuse to be here.