The Good People Protecting Animals

what do this bird watcher neuroscientist and the inventor of elephant prosthetics share they all build unique bonds with animals high five meet the people giving them a leg up [Music] i am attracted to the bluebirds because of their beauty [Music] my name is al larsen i'm 97 years old or young these bluebirds are about 11 days old i've helped over 40 000 nestlings every living thing has just as much right to live as i do i'm a bird watcher by choice i guess when i retired in the late 70s last 1970s i came upon this article in national geographic and i became aware of the plight of the bluebird their population has been declining and the importance of the nest box to the survival of the bluebirds and i thought well why don't i try that here so one of the first nest boxes i set up a bluebird moved into it and immediately hey success i should put up more boxes oh this is a second nest you can see different material built on top there well i'll go on to the next box now see what's going on there these nest boxes that i use are ones that i built at home i came up with a solution of building the box as simply as possible cheap to build with just four sides a bottom and a roof anybody could build it even kids over the years i have added more than 350 nest boxes out my bluebird trails cover quite an area in southwest idaho actually i've got a trail in each of five different counties i monitor the boxes regularly to record the data of what goes on with the development of the nesting cycle of the bluebirds i've shared my data with boise state university the abandoning laboratory at patuxent maryland and anybody else who requested [Music] pretty little bluebird where do you go come back come back to me i'm going says a bird as he flew on high to see if my color matches the sky i'm gratified to know that i've helped the bluebirds increase their population i'm gratified to know that through the work i've done i've inspired many many other people to help not only bloopers but other creatures as well so maybe i've been put here to help our environment my message is you've got to be active if you're going to get old don't uh crawl into a cocoon because you might not break out of it so think about the future and what you can do tomorrow plan ahead give me a hug yes i know that's good do some training i work with dogs to train them to go into an mri scanner and try to figure out what makes them tick and what they're thinking my name is gregory burns i'm a neuroscientist at emory university in atlanta georgia i've grown up with dogs and i've lived with dogs pretty much my whole life one of my favorite dogs had passed away in the back of my mind i started wondering did that dog love me in the way that i loved him and that was really the beginning of it all of these basic things that we've begun to sort out in humans at least in human brains we want to do in dogs if dogs can be trained to go into an mri machine then maybe we could figure out what they're actually thinking so we have a dog in the scanner that's katie and she is a veteran of the project this is probably about the 15th time she's done this just having the idea of okay well let's train dogs to go on the scanner it wasn't immediately apparent how you would go about doing that and and mri scanners are not the most pleasant environments okay hey cal coyle good girl callie is the little black terrier who was the first dog to train for the dog project high five i built a simulator of an mri so this is the simulator that i built here in my basement then we started adding in recordings of the scanner noise which is actually quite loud we just started working with you know treats and positive reinforcement to see if we could get her to go into this thing [Music] that actually proved to be pretty easy and then so what we did was we kind of put out word of mouth do you want to join this project you want to train your dogs for an mri and you know maybe figure out what they're thinking the purpose of this is to go through a number of exercises including basic obedience as well as how they react to the obstacles when we hold the tryouts it lets us weed out the dogs that we don't think would enjoy doing this one of the benefits then of having more participants as it gives you statistical power you can start to average dogs brains together and get a better sense for what's happening i started wondering very seriously if we could really finally answer this question do dogs essentially like us just for the social bond and not about the food and what we found was looking at the reward system that almost all the dogs had equal responses both to food as well as praise and even a few dogs like the praise more the things that we were finding about the dog's brain in many ways confirm i think what people know in their hearts about how dogs behave and why they behave the way i think about dogs is in many ways they're the ambassadors to the animal world they're not that different from many of the other mammals out there and so i suspect that a lot of what we find in dogs probably holds true for pretty much any [Music] mammal musha lost a leg when she was two years old from landmine i thought that i should do something for her dr turchai chirakat is working with the world's first elephant hospital located in thailand since it opened more than 4 000 injured and sick elephants have been treated i'm the first one who invented the artificial leg for the elephant [Music] using his knowledge as an orthopedic surgeon dr tur chai designed mousha's artificial limb when she was just a baby accounting for the elephant's weight and size as she has grown pressure on the prosthetic has increased causing it to break so a new one is created every few years this is a challenge for me too every time we fix it we improve it it's more sturdy stronger this you know in the textbook sometimes try and early when she obeys me gave her candy and she know where the candy is she used a trunk to go into the pocket she knew i did operation on her food about 15 years ago but she she remembered me she liked to come closer to me she showed a sign of salute or happy i think it means so much for her she can live a normal life as she should be in the middle of a political upheaval one ukrainian zookeeper set out to make a difference in his own way on the private estate of an ousted president sergey used to be a zoologist at the kiev's zoo [Music] one night in 2014 he was watching the news and learned that amidst the chaos ukrainian president viktor yanukovych had fled his compound in mejuhira leaving his private zoo behind [Music] you when he arrived sergey was stunned by the huge opulent estate and saw the animals needed desperate care [Music] he [Music] [Music] today sergey and a handful of volunteers take care of thousands of animals on the estate [Music] level [Music] the zoo is slowly growing and sergey has big hopes for the future [Music] is [Music] [Music] is [Music] 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Channel: Great Big Story

Views: 204,888

Keywords: great big story, gbs, lag, documentary, docs, New releases, Great Big Reels, Nature & Animals, animals, animal dedication, love animals, selfless, wheelchairs for dogs, veterinarian, zoo, vet, animal friend, saving animals, deer, dog, Ukraine, Taiwan, ostriches

Id: JuDxiKrlIkg

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020