What Do Animals Actually Think About Humans? — Transcript

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1. 0:00You walked past a bird today. It flew
2. 0:01away. You probably didn't think much of
3. 0:03it, but that bird made a decision about
4. 0:05you before you even got close. It
5. 0:07calculated your speed, your direction,
6. 0:09whether you made eye contact, and it ran
7. 0:11a threat assessment that took less than
8. 0:13a second. It didn't guess, it knew. Most
9. 0:15people assume animals just react to
10. 0:17movement, or size, or noise, that
11. 0:19they're basically living smoke
12. 0:21detectors. Trigger a threshold, get a
13. 0:23response. That's not quite right. The
14. 0:25real answer is far stranger. Animals
15. 0:28don't just notice you. They have built a
16. 0:30model of what you are, and what you are
17. 0:32to almost every animal on Earth is the
18. 0:34most dangerous thing that has ever
19. 0:36existed. Not metaphorically,
20. 0:38scientifically. In 2019, researchers
21. 0:41from the University of California ran an
22. 0:43experiment in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
23. 0:45They played sounds through hidden
24. 0:46speakers to mountain lions, bobcats,
25. 0:49deer, and smaller mammals. First, sounds
26. 0:52of frogs, neutral, no reaction. Then,
27. 0:55sounds of lions and wolves. Animals
28. 0:57fled. Then, sounds of humans talking.
29. 1:00The animals fled faster and stayed gone
30. 1:02longer. The lead researcher, Justin
31. 1:04Suraci, published the results in Ecology
32. 1:07Letters. The conclusion was direct. Wild
33. 1:09animals are more afraid of the human
34. 1:11voice than the sound of apex predators.
35. 1:13Not equally afraid, more afraid. Think
36. 1:16about what that means. A mountain lion
37. 1:18is at the top of its food chain. It has
38. 1:19no natural predators. It fears nothing
39. 1:22that evolved alongside it. But the sound
40. 1:24of a human conversation sends it running
41. 1:27like prey, because over thousands of
42. 1:29years, that's exactly what happened.
43. 1:31Humans didn't just hunt, humans
44. 1:33eliminated. We didn't compete with apex
45. 1:35predators, we replaced them. And the
46. 1:38animals that survived were the ones that
47. 1:39learned to treat us differently from
48. 1:41anything else that had ever walked the
49. 1:42Earth. But it goes deeper than fear.
50. 1:44Animals don't just react to you, they
51. 1:46study you. Crows are the clearest
52. 1:48example. In 2008, John Marzluff at the
53. 1:51University of Washington ran a study
54. 1:53where researchers wore rubber masks
55. 1:55masks while trapping and banding crows
56. 1:56on campus. The masks were specific,
57. 1:59identifiable. After released, the crows
58. 2:01began scolding anyone who wore that
59. 2:02mask, not people in general, not
60. 2:04strangers. That specific face. They
61. 2:07remembered it. But here's where it gets
62. 2:08uncomfortable. Over time, crows that had
63. 2:11never been trapped, crows that weren't
64. 2:12even alive during the original study,
65. 2:14also began scolding the masked face. The
66. 2:16knowledge transferred parent to
67. 2:18offspring through behavior. The crows
68. 2:20didn't just recognize a face, they built
69. 2:22a cultural memory of a threat and passed
70. 2:24it down like a warning. Elephants do
71. 2:26something similar, but with more
72. 2:28information than crows. Research by
73. 2:30Karen McComb at the University of Sussex
74. 2:32showed that elephants in Amboseli, Kenya
75. 2:35could distinguish between two local
76. 2:37groups purely by smell and the sound of
77. 2:39their voices. One group, the Maasai, had
78. 2:42a history of occasional conflict with
79. 2:44elephants. The other, the Kamba, did
80. 2:46not. When elephants heard a Maasai voice
81. 2:48on a recording, they bunched together,
82. 2:50went quiet, and moved downwind. When
83. 2:53they heard the Kamba voice, almost no
84. 2:55reaction. They weren't reacting to
85. 2:57human. They were reacting to that
86. 2:59specific group of humans based on
87. 3:01cultural information they had learned
88. 3:02and stored over time. Now, think about
89. 3:04what this adds up to. Animals aren't
90. 3:06just sensing you. They are categorizing
91. 3:09you, building a file, running a
92. 3:10continuous background process that asks
93. 3:12a single question. What kind of human is
94. 3:15this and what has that kind of human
95. 3:16done before? The study that pulls all of
96. 3:18this together came in 2018. Researchers
97. 3:21from UC Berkeley and other institutions
98. 3:23analyzed decades of data on animal
99. 3:25behavior across multiple continents.
100. 3:28Published in Science. The finding was
101. 3:30this. Human presence alone, not hunting,
102. 3:33not noise, not habitat destruction, just
103. 3:35the presence of humans, caused animals
104. 3:38to shift to nocturnal behavior. Animals
105. 3:40that were naturally active during the
106. 3:41day moved their entire activity window
107. 3:44to night simply to avoid contact with
108. 3:46humans. The effect was three times
109. 3:49stronger than the presence of actual
110. 3:50predators. Three times. We didn't just
111. 3:53change the landscape, we changed time.
112. 3:55Animals restructured when they exist in
113. 3:57the world because of us, and they did it
114. 3:59without being taught, without any single
115. 4:02traumatic event. They did it because the
116. 4:03information accumulated across enough
117. 4:05generations that it became the default
118. 4:07setting. So, what do animals think about
119. 4:09you? It depends on the animal, but the
120. 4:11pattern is consistent. They have
121. 4:13assessed you, they have filed you, and
122. 4:15the verdict for most species is that you
123. 4:18are something that has no equivalent in
124. 4:20the 500 million years of predator-prey
125. 4:22relationships that shaped life on this
126. 4:24planet. You are not a predator to them.
127. 4:26Predators hunt to eat. Predators have
128. 4:28limits, hunger, territory, season.
129. 4:32Predators fit into the system. You
130. 4:34don't. You alter the system. You change
131. 4:37the rules. You show up and time itself
132. 4:40shifts. The bird that flew away from you
133. 4:43today wasn't being skittish. It was
134. 4:44being accurate. It had run the
135. 4:46calculation that its ancestors encoded
136. 4:48into it over thousands of contact with
137. 4:50humans. And the answer it got was the
138. 4:52same answer almost every animal gets.
139. 4:55Give this one space. Not because you're
140. 4:58evil, not because you're cruel, but
141. 5:00because you are the only thing on Earth
142. 5:02that every other living thing had to
143. 5:03build a new category for. There was no
144. 5:05template for us. We didn't fit predator,
145. 5:08we didn't fit disaster, we didn't fit
146. 5:10disease. We were something new.
147. 5:13And the animals that are still here are
148. 5:15the ones that figured that out before it
149. 5:16was too late. That's what they think
150. 5:18about you.