The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations

In captivity, a large proportion of mammals fight, more or less; and the closer the confinement, the greater their nervousness and irritability, and the more fighting. Monkeys fight freely and frequently. Serpents, lizards, and alligators rarely do, although large alligators are prone to bite off the tails or legs of their small companions, or even to devour them whole. Storks, trumpeter swans, darters, jays, and some herons are so quarrelsome and dangerous that they must be kept well separated from other species, to prevent mutilation and murder. In 1900, when a pair of trumpeter swans were put upon a lake in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, with three brown pelicans for associates, they promptly assailed the pelicans, dug holes in their backs, and killed all three. The common red squirrel is a persistent fighter of the gray species, and, although inferior in size, nearly always wins. A Fight Between a Whale and a Swordfish. One of the strangest wild animal combats on record was thus described in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, for 1909.