YouTube says it's cracking down on animal torture videos

By Rachael Bale, ANIMALS Executive Editor

YouTube abounds with heartwarming animal rescue stories. Videos of former laboratory dogs feeling grass for the first time never fail to make me tear up. In another sub-genre, predators’ activities are interrupted by a kindly human, who wrests a poor gibbon from the grips of a python or defends a helpless lizard from an eagle bearing down with its talons. (Above, a Burmese python, a species often featured as a predator but sometimes as prey.)

Setting aside the fact that it’s just nature—predators must kill to eat—there’s something seriously wrong with many of these videos.

They’re often fake.

In search of likes, some YouTubers stage these videos by putting animals in cruel and unnatural situations to instigate attacks, just so people can film themselves saving the day. Nat Geo’s Dina Fine Maron found them all over YouTube, despite the company’s policy banning videos in which humans have encouraged animals to fight.

Experts that Maron interviewed pointed out clues that signal fakes: nocturnal predators attacking in the daylight, carnivores preying on animals they don’t normally hunt, and even what appears to be the same individual animals showing up in multiple videos.

YouTube reps declined Nat Geo’s interview requests and did not explain why these videos had been allowed to proliferate, despite many being flagged by activists previously. When Maron, however, asked about specific videos, YouTube immediately took them down. Then the day before we published our investigation, YouTube announced it was expanding its policy on violent and graphic content explicitly to ban staged rescue videos that put animals at risk. It has yet to provide details on how it will implement the policy.

Read the full story, and learn how to identify and report fake rescue videos, here.

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TODAY IN A MINUTE

A cockatoo mystery: What’s a non-migratory bird from Australia and New Zealand doing in a 1496 Italian painting? An Australian scholar made the discovery when examining the “Madonna della Vittoria,” by Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna. The setting of the painting, now in the Louvre, was northern Italy. The appearance of a cockatoo there adds to our knowledge about Italian trade routes, and the bird likely came by sea through the coasts of India and Arabia, historian Heather Dalton tells the New Yorker.

What washed up on the beach this week? Odd sea creatures that look like little severed fingers, or big bumpy worms, have been dotting the sands of Southern California’s shoreline recently. The latest ones, called free-floating colonial tunicates, are typically found out in the open ocean. “There’s been an outrageous bloom of them lately, over the past couple months,” marine biologist Julianne Steers told the Orange County Register.

Snack attack: With more than 2,700 mouths to feed among 390 species, the Smithsonian’s National Zoo dishes out a lot of food every day. The zoo recently shared on its blog what it takes to feed an army of animals.

In plain sight: Most of us are attracted to butterflies for their bright, colorful patterns. However, some species have see-through wings that look like glass, the better to hide from predators. Researchers recently put them under the microscope to figure out how they make their wings transparent, Science News reports. “It’s really hard to do,” says James Barnett, a behavioral scientist. “You have to modify your entire body to minimize any scattering or reflection of light.”

‘Conflict within conflict’: In the lush forests of Indian-administered Kashmir, there’s a rise in animal attacks. An armed rebellion has made Kashmir one of the bloodiest conflict zones in the world. Now, encounters with black bears and leopards are creating new anxieties in a region already grappling with the decades-old conflict, Al Jazeera reports.

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Brown bear, brown bear: The wild landscapes at Katmai National Park and Preserve in southern Alaska span tundra, forests, lakes, and mountains. Among its most famous settings is Brooks Falls, where brown bears gather to wait for salmon. With an estimated 2,200 brown bears living in the park, Katmai is one of the top areas in the world for viewing these bears.

Related: One family’s effort to keep Alaska wild

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THE LAST GLIMPSE

Incredible rainforest sounds: Fifty microphones captured a cacophony of sounds from Congo’s Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, including gorilla chest beats, chimpanzee pant-hoots, elephant rumbles—and poachers’ weapons. The recordings cover 480 miles of forest, and the sounds are now available to researchers worldwide, Nat Geo reports.

The National Geographic Society funds our Wildlife Watch unit, which is dedicated to shining a light on wildlife exploitation. Learn more.

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