Displaced aggression is when a person displays – redirects – hostility toward a different person because he or she feels intimidated by or weaker than the person he or she is annoyed with.
One of my neighbors in Portsmouth did it. He sometimes made angry remarks at me that had nothing to do with me. I found it puzzling until it dawned on me that the remarks applied to his partner. They used to quarrel, in what sounded like a very healthy respectful albeit angry manner, but they had stopped quarreling.
Well, birds do this too.
There is a group of six white geese where I am right now and I connected with them months ago, just by talking with them. They often greet me with softer or louder honks. Hi! Hi hi! Hi hi hi! Hi!
The lead goose is pretty bossy and his eyes speak volumes.
I’d brought them escarole twice over the months (in hot dry weather). The second time, they already knew that I had something for them when I walked up, just from my movements, the way I walked.
One day, he looked at me with undisguised anger. “I thought you had food but all you did was grab a handkerchief to blow your nose!” So I got some spinach, on sale, to make up for it, but while walking back I started wondering about the oxalic acid content. (It can interfere with the calcium metabolism of birds.)
Mr Lead Goose was furious. “Spinach? You brought us spinach!?!”
He was so furious that, yes, I went back to get some escarole.
“I wanted bread!” Yeah, well, the others were happy with the escarole. One of them did eat spinach too, but admittedly, somewhat reluctantly.
Last week, he was in one of his moods again. He sees me as challenging him or eroding his power a little at times. He then picked on one of the other geese, clearly because he didn’t risk pecking me. I interfered. That’s a goose who had a leg injury and was limping but the leg has gradually improved over the months.
So then he diverted his attention to (smaller) Nile geese, a couple and their two kids. He picked on one of the parents.
I stepped between them.
I’ve also previously stepped between a great blue heron and the Nile goose youngsters.
All you need to do is stand between them. (The heron I walked off. He needed to move away just a little. He flew off by a mere meter or so. Message received. Goal accomplished.)
The white geese were all very intrigued by all this.
This morning, the six white geese honked at me and swam with me, to a spot on the shore where the Nile geese already happened to be, to the left of a pedestrian bridge.
I then saw one of the Nile goose youngsters pick on a pigeon. I had to laugh. That one had clearly been watching Mr White Lead Goose.
There’s also sometimes a swan and right now (that is, yesterday), a swan couple with a kid. The geese keep a respectful distance. You don’t mess with a swan.
(The geese also warn each other about dogs, btw.)
If they can redirect anger, then they can also empathize.
Sure enough, I’ve seen quaker parrots look out – step up – for cats. Cats!
I’ve also seen a pigeon understand that mice too need to eat and that you should drop some food somewhere on purpose if you don’t want them to go somewhere else and that you shouldn’t be sloppy with your food there.
If pigeons know how to deter rodents humanely, then so can humans.
And we all know the racket that magpies make to warn everyone else if they see a cat on the prowl (or a bird of prey in the air). They warn everyone, usually perched pretty high up so that they can monitor the cat. They don’t just warn their own kind.
PS Non-human animals sometimes do things, play games, to test a human, to assess how much of a danger you might represent. Humans sometimes do something similar. They can become a real pest just to test another person’s loyalty. “Can I drive you away or will I always be able to count on you?” My youngest sister once told me that she’d done that with a boyfriend. She’s very smart, yes. People with insight in themselves are pretty precious.
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