A bad study premise

[Pajarita]

I am putting this here to show how bad concepts in bird care can come from scientific studies that were not done correctly.

This is a study about hierarchy and how birds use social networks to pick opponents but they used quakers in an aviary! And I will tell you why I think that they cannot get a good result from it. The whole thing was to see if and how birds fight for a higher level in a hierarchical society but you can't use a made-up flock kept captive in an aviary for that - the whole thing is skewed by the unnatural conditions! Quakers flocks are matriarchal and matrilineal so putting together a bunch of unrelated birds they managed to trap or breed and keeping them in unnatural conditions couldn't possibly give them the right answer to their questions. You need to study the animals in their natural habitat and their natural social grouping not one made up by humans. Mind you, I am not saying that there are no birds that bully and that the response (a weaker bird flies away from a stronger, confronting bird and that the A vs B vs C works) they observe is not valid because it is but if they had observed a natural flock, where all the birds are related through their mothers, they would have found that bullying is almost non-existent.

https://phys.org/news/2020-06-birds-soc ... nents.html

[Pajarita]

This is actually a study on flamingos and how the pinker birds breed more but also fight more but I decided to post it here to show how lack of enough room causes problems that would not really exist in the wild - and why I think that the previous study is flawed: you can't study animals behavior related to aggression in captive situations, the results will be skewed by the unnatural conditions.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/anim ... B745B610A6