TThe best thing that happened to me during the whole pandemic was a story on the internet. A laid-off Oregon resident saw on a daytime nature documentary that if you feed crows, they’ll bring you small gifts. Curious, they gave it a try, and were delighted to find themselves in effective possession of a family of 15 crows – but then things took a dark turn. The crows became an army, fiercely protecting their leader’s property. If neighbors came close, the crows would dive-bomb them. “To be clear,” the person wrote on Reddit, “they are not aggressive 100% of the time. If only the neighbors were out [on their own porch]they are friendly, normal crows. They only get aggressive when someone comes near me or my property.”
It’s such a sweet phrase, “friendly, normal crows”; it’s just a shame that it’s an oxymoron. Crows are the most amazing grudges, which a professor of wildlife at Washington University, John Marzluff, discovered by capturing seven of the birds while wearing an ogre mask in 2006. A full 17 years later, crows still regularly attacked him. Even if you were to question the ethics of his original experiment, you would have to admit that he paid a high price. How such a thing is possible when the lifespan of a crow is only 12 years is this: not only can they harbor a grudge, they can also pass it on to each other. Originally, even birds that saw the ogre trap attacked Marzluff, and over time they passed the hostility on to their offspring, creating a multigenerational grudge.
We can’t say for sure since there are so many species and only one Marzluff, but it seems likely to me that we are the only species that can match this level of grudge, without which there would be no Romeo and Juliet, no Wuthering Heights and no Lee “the Jester” Greig and Drew Galloway, the professional wrestlers whose career-long animus propelled them to, well, maybe not worldwide fame, but certainly to a lot more wrestling. I personally don’t have the concentration span for a grudge; I once started a feud with my sister – a huge grievance, written down on paper – and it evaporated in 15 seconds, when she said at a family gathering that she liked my mascara.
The cliché about resentment is that it is like eating poison and waiting for the other person to die; in the end you will only harm yourself. There is a large body of research on resentment’s opposite, forgiveness, and its benefits for healthwhich includes but is not limited to better cardiovascular, immune and respiratory systems. You also have to wonder what bitterness says about you personally; a research paper in 2021 – around the same time the crow army was underway – identified the drives and characteristics of the grudge holder: “a need for validation, moral superiority, inability to let go, latency (ie existing but not manifesting), breaking ties”. Do you want to be that person? Because they sound like a dick, don’t they?
But the fact that it exists in the animal kingdom surely suggests that there is some evolutionary advantage to it, which is the case that Robert Enright, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, makes: especially among athletes, short-term -resentments have an observable motivating effect.
It is only when they are so pronounced and long-range that they become part of your identity that they are a problem, effectively trapping you in a dyad with your nemesis so that you cannot grow unless they do, and you will never know if they have because their identity has calcified in your mind. Paradoxically, it leaves you quite dependent on them, which I noticed when my father died, and my mother – who had divorced him 25 years earlier but nursed a healthy, even life-affirming anger all along – had a heart attack . . I wonder if she will mind that – either my interpretation, or me saying it like that in public. She’ll just have to wear it unfortunately because I’m on a deadline.
Here, the multigenerational resentment seems particularly problematic: the original insult is only totemic to the second generation, which ironically makes it harder to move, even if it is felt less authentically.
That Oregon resident, by the way, found a solution through the local Audubon Society: if the neighbors also start feeding the crows, the grudges will disappear and the crows will happily divide their courtship between several households. It worked, and perhaps holds a wider lesson: resentment is great, but always leave room for yourself to row back, for the right temptation.
