Are you serious ? Is that true?
I thought only humans and the ocational pig ate hot peppers ?

Nope! Birds can't feel the "hotness" of the peppers. It's a rather
nifty evolutionary advantage:

When the pepper is consumed by an animal, the seeds will (hopefully) pass
through the animals' digestive tract relatively unharmed, then fall out in a
nice pile of... well, "seed-starting fertilizer". Then that seed will have
a pretty good chance of growing into a new plant.

Here's where it gets good: If the animal that consumed the pepper was a
mammal, it's not going to travel very far before that seed falls out. That
means that when the seed sprouts, the emergent plant, or it's progeny down
the line, is now local competition for the original plant. Since a lot of
peppers are found in pretty harsh environments, having the plant's offspring
competing with it can deplete resources (such as water) enough to jeapardize
*all* of them. Not a good idea!

Well, enter capsaicin, the chemical that makes peppers spicy. It just
so happens that birds don't have chemoreceptors for capsaicin, meaning they
aren't affected by the spiciness. If a *bird* eats the pepper, chances are
that when that seed falls to the ground in a pile of fertilizer, it's going
to be significantly farther away from the original plant than if a mammal
had eaten it. That means that the plant gets the best of both worlds: It
gets to spread its seed (literally and figuratively), but doesn't have to
deal with the local competition from its own progeny. A pretty nifty trick!

- steve