[Animals] How fake animal rescue videos have become a new frontier for animal abuse

[Love Pulse]

 

 

Mark Auliya has no problem with snakes attacking other animals. Carnivores need to eat, after all. But last month, staring at a YouTube video in his home office in Bonn, Germany, the reptile expert threw his glasses down in disgust. “This is something really nasty,” he said.

On Auliya's screen, a Burmese python, a constrictor that normally kills birds and small mammals, was locked onto a gibbon. The panicked primate was fighting for its life as the snake, coiled around its torso, began squeezing. Soon, the gibbon stopped moving. A man in a blue soccer jersey and jeans appears. Hurriedly, he uncoils the python, freeing the gibbon, and carries the snake offscreen. The traumatized gibbon cowers, covering its head.

"It's so obvious this is fake, but people believe it," says Auliya, a herpetologist at the Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig. The video seemed to suggest that the rescuer had arrived just in time to save the gibbon. But pythons first bite prey animals to anchor their constriction—something that didn't happen in the gibbon video, Auliya says. Pythons also are nocturnal hunters, yet this video and many like it were shot during the day.

To Auliya, the only things that appeared real were the mistreatment of the animals being forced into these situations and the stress it must have caused them.

Several years ago, animal welfare groups first started noticing that videos of fake animal rescues were proliferating on YouTube. They're all variations on a theme: An eagle attacks a snake, a crocodile attacks a duck, snakes attack pet cats, dogs, lizards. In each case, the kills are thwarted by human saviors who conveniently come upon them or hear the animals' cries in time to prevent carnage.

Making the videos causes stress, injury, and likely death for the animals involved, says Anne-Lise Chaber, a wildlife veterinarian and One Health specialist at the University of Adelaide, in Australia. Beyond that, fake animal rescues spread misconceptions about species and inspire copycats, says Chaber, who has studied how YouTube normalizes the exotic pet trade and interactions between humans and wild animals. It's natural for animals to predate in the wild, without human intervention, yet the videos mislead viewers about animals' natural behaviors, demonizing predator species such as snakes and birds of prey.

They also divert attention from genuine animal welfare and conservation issues, says Daniel Natusch, a conservation biologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and a member of several reptile specialist groups with the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The IUCN sets the conservation status of wild animals. The videos often have titles with phrasing such as “primitive man saves snake” which encourages “racial intolerance and misunderstanding” he says.

Why do people force captive animals into dangerous or harmful situations? To get as many clicks as possible and likely make money. By posting something that gets millions of clicks on social media, someone potentially can make thousands of dollars, according to Jason Urgo, the CEO of Social Blade, a company that tracks social media platform statistics. Anyone can create a YouTube channel and post videos to it. But to begin profiting from the Google-owned platform's ad-sharing programs, channel owners need a thousand subscribers and 4,000 hours of viewership during the previous 12 months.

Since the first YouTube video was uploaded in 2005, the platform has grown exponentially—and with it, criticism that it doesn't do enough to prevent content judged to the public good, such as hoax conspiracies, hate speech, animal cruelty, and more. Its community guidelines bar "violent or gory content intended to shock or disgust viewers," and the company says it has hired 10,000 people and uses machine learning to moderate the 500 hours of video uploaded to the platform every minute. Between January and March 2021, YouTube says it removed more than nine million videos for violating its community guidelines.

Yet the review process is cumbersome, slow, and inconsistent, current and former moderators have told The Washington Post. To help speed things up, YouTube has created tools such as its Trusted Flagger program—a way government agencies and NGOs, among others, can assist with moderation. Flaggers can't remove videos, but items singled out “may expedite review by our teams,” according to YouTube's written policies.

 

Waiting for a remedy
In March 2021, YouTube announced that it would take action in the next few weeks to ban fake animal rescue videos. Since then, more than a hundred have been posted and hundreds remain, according to tracking from Lady Freethinker, a California-based animal welfare nonprofit.

Lady Freethinker applied to join YouTube's flagger program in April 2021. But days later, YouTube informed them that it was not “actively onboarding flaggers with expertise in the policy areas most relevant to your organization at this time,” Nina Jackel, the founder and president of Lady Freethinker, says.

YouTube did not respond to questions about that decision and declined National Geographic's interview requests. “We have a dedicated policy team that reviews and updates our policies on an ongoing basis, and keeps them current,” the company said in a statement.

The channel featuring the python-gibbon video, which has 83,000 subscribers, published nine dubious “rescue” videos in May. A post on another channel that claims to feature a “real fight” between a pig and a python has had more than six million clicks since it was published in March 2020; Nearly a million of those were in May alone. (YouTube deactivated the channels in June after National Geographic contacted the company to request an interview, and shared a list of videos with suspect rescues involving animals.