YouTube's Fake Animal Rescue Channels

as a platform youtube is home to an incredible amount of channels run by users who are desperate for fame to the point that they would do just about anything to achieve it i may fail but if i fail i want to die trying a risky attempt at fame left aspiring youtube star pedro ruiz iii dead this is nothing new of course but every day i find it more and more shocking the lengths that people will go through just to gain internet clout today's example is one of the more disturbing for starters let's address something the internet has long since had an animal abuse problem so often accounts will pop up showcasing vile and disgusting treatments of animals by users desperately in search of attention this issue has always been rampant and unfortunately it doesn't seem like it will ever stop as new cases seemingly appear every week or so but on youtube there's a similar issue happening right now only it features a slight variation it seems that on the platform there are a variety of channels that are abusing animals such as cats and dogs just not in the way that we are used to instead the videos paint these abusers to be heroes it's a difficult phenomenon to explain so let me just show you to start our investigation we're going to be taking a look at an account called km animal a channel with just two posts but that's all they needed to make a lasting impact a video entitled boy rescues baby puppy was bitten by big dog was posted to youtube on april 3rd 2018. the caption is filled with broken english but basically what they're saying is that they found this puppy who had a bite from a bigger dog that they couldn't find and they rescued the puppy by giving it medicine now i'm gonna censor most of this video because there is nothing more triggering to me than seeing a puppy in pain but it basically shows a dog with what appears to be a bleeding cut near its neck the dog is clearly in pain and totally terrified but luckily these kids stumbled upon it and were able to bring it out to safety they rubbed some medicine on the dog and just like that it was back on its feet there was even a follow-up video posted to the channel that showed the puppy being completely fine without so much as a scar or even any sign of a wound for that matter honestly this is some wholesome content they saved this poor adorable helpless puppy these kids are heroes is exactly what they wanted you to think in the first video i showed you people noticed that something was off with the puppy's supposed bite marks the story was that a big dog had bit the young puppy causing a severe injury but there's something about this injury something isn't quite right on the puppy there is only one mark that looks more like a cut than anything if he had truly been bitten then wouldn't there have been injuries all over his body given the fact that grown dogs typically have 42 teeth so if a grown dog had really bitten this puppy with that much strength then those other teeth surely would have caused damage too so the possibility of this actually being a bite mark is all but impossible unless the dog literally only had one tooth plus the wound very clearly isn't a puncture and again it looks more like a slice which is inconsistent with a bite mark as well and something else wasn't adding up either when looking at the update video the young puppy was still a puppy and it looked to be the same exact size yet the wound had healed over so much that it was unrecognizable large wounds on dogs like that would typically take as long as six weeks to heal if left open and that's not including the months that it would take to fully scar over and then the years it would take for that scar to become this unnoticeable so all in all the recovery time for the dog to look that good could have been years and yet that dog was still a puppy now going a little further this looks to be a labrador meaning that by just three months old it would already be nearing 25 pounds and by six months it would be as high as 50 but this dog is just as small as it was before making this update video all but impossible to be true so what does this all mean it means that everything here is clearly staged everything but the dog's wound and since we already know that it couldn't have come from a dog like they said it appears that these kids did the unthinkable they took a perfectly healthy puppy filmed it as footage to use for their update video and then they took a sharp object likely a knife and cut the puppy on its chest after the dog was injured they placed it under a deck and pretended to rescue it so that they could look like the heroes that explains why the wound looked more like a cut and it explains why they never found the actual dog who bit the puppy because it didn't exist stabbing an innocent puppy to look cool on youtube and acting like you're a hero it's one of the most disgusting things that i've seen on the platform honestly this makes me just lose so much faith in humanity but i was at least happy to see that people were smart enough to see through this channel's lies only this wasn't actually the case see there's some information that i haven't shared with you yet this channel actually wasn't the original km animals in fact both of these videos were just re-uploads instead the original km animals channel had amassed nearly 1 million subscribers by doing this very same practice and it was universally loved every video was fake and put these animals lives at risk yet even for the videos we just analyzed the support was overwhelmingly positive with it garnering millions of views and nobody caught on for a very long time until it was eventually exposed by youtubers pay money wubby and everyday stray once the truth had been revealed the channel was shut down with youtube vowing to put an end to fake animal rescue content but it is worth noting that km animals still has a youtube channel that is functioning to this day called km daily whose videos also deal with animals now it doesn't appear that they're abusing them anymore but it does rub me the wrong way that they're still able to post content and rack up hundreds of thousands of subscribers who likely have no idea about the horrible things they've done in the past but i'll let you be the judge of that the exposing of km animals was a huge deal in 2019 and with youtube's response one would imagine that it would be much harder to get away with on the platform today but this doesn't seem to be the case as in the past week i've been able to find a few channels that are concerning let's begin with happy dog this channel was brought to my attention by a reddit post made by moviexpert786 who questioned how legitimate the channel really was in looking into it i see what they mean happydog has been actively posting on youtube for just 10 months but in that span they've been able to amass 170 000 subscribers and 48 million views with most of their videos receiving a high amount of praise in the majority of their uploads the people behind the camera will find a trapped or injured animal and seemingly an impossible situation situations that clearly wouldn't happen often in nature and yet they find a new one every single day it seems like as they've recently began uploading practically daily now this alone could just be a coincidence so let's take a look at some specific examples of these impossible situations starting with the video rescue the puppy trapped in fishing net [Music] in this video we see a dog tangled desperately in a red net making it impossible for the puppy to move that's when the camera cuts to a scene that shows us where the puppy was found just looking at this fort of chairs it clearly seems staged and something about it just doesn't sit right with me see how tangled up this dog is every limb is wrapped even its neck is caught around it and we know this puppy is completely immobilized meaning that it couldn't have walked into this fort after it was already tangled so that means that this net must have been inside of that little den and the puppy would have had to climb in and get caught up in it inside of there but in my opinion that's not even possible for any animal to get this hopelessly trapped it would have had to have rolled around tried to escape and moved all over the place it's a situation where the more you move the more you trap yourself you don't get this caught just by standing on the net or laying on it it requires movement and most importantly space to get this stuck yet that then barely had enough room for the puppy to fit in there is nowhere near enough room for this dog to have gotten this tangled in that small little space and we already know he couldn't have crawled in afterwards and there's more when i watched the video back i noticed that the thumbnail seemed strange because at no point of this video was the puppy ever in this position not once and they supposedly showed the rescue from the moment they found the dog to the moment it was freed so this shows us that this thumbnail was clearly staged meaning that they had this dog tangled up off camera in the net completely discrediting the idea that they had found it and immediately freed it now with all this considered i believe that this video is definitely a fake and they put this puppy in a horrible situation just for views and the content only gets more dangerous from here in the video rescue poor puppy with his mouth tied up they claim to have stumbled upon a dog who had a rock falling on him and who also had his mouth tied up now a few concerns here if the dog was covered by a rock you wouldn't be able to see it and if its mouth was tied up you wouldn't be able to hear it from far away so how again did they notice it also you see them pulling the rock off of the dog yet the camera shows the ditch that the puppy was found in earlier in the video which made me realize where did the rock fall from the dog was in the middle of a wide ditch now by the end of the video they are clearly pretending that they have never seen this dog before by acting afraid of it and so to try and help they start smacking it it's very disturbing and very dumb at the same time because after all the dog's mouth is literally tied so with all of this i feel like this is another fake video where they actually put the rock on top of that dog and tied its mouth just for content now one of the most obvious signs that this is all being fake is an upload from june 10th called rescue puppy from snake attack crying for help this video is very graphic so i'll blur it but it shows a puppy being attacked by a snake in the beginning the people behind the camera take 30 seconds to film the situation with one questioning what are we going to do oh my god so what we do now all the while you can clearly see that the other person has a snake pole and could have easily helped the situation 30 seconds before instead of just filming the dog literally being killed so they prioritized getting a good shot and setting a good story to saving the dog's life which shows us that at the very least they valued their production quality over the dog's life in this situation and i also want to briefly mention that this dog looks an awful lot like one of the puppies they had rescued a month previously but this video is important for one specific reason out of the first five months of this channel this was the first snake attack rescue that was uploaded which leads me to believe that this is a fairly rare thing as if they had had these rescues before we would have seen them now this video gained a staggering 4 million views which is the first time that the channel had gotten close to this kind of viewership since its first month of existence so in other words this video kind of broke a dry spell on the channel which tells us something that these snake videos are good for views and so interestingly enough after that video went viral all of the sudden they started rescuing more animals from these snakes clearly this was something that wasn't common as it had never happened in the channel's first five months yet since that video went viral they've posted 13 other snake rescue videos in just two months it's clear to me that they saw how well the first one did and continued staging these attacks so they could keep pulling views and some of these videos are so clearly fake like this one for example the video shows a puppy being attacked by what they say is a king cobra in it the dog is dirty and has been bitten by the snake on its leg now a king cobra bite can have enough venom to kill a full-grown elephant so this puppy should not have survived long after this yet happy dog takes the puppy directly to the vet gives it a shot and miraculously it survives so that alone is unlikely as the dog wouldn't have survived for more than a few minutes but also i noticed something else when the dog is being attacked it is dirty and bleeding from its leg yet by the time they reach the hospital the dog is perfectly clean and the injury is nowhere to be found so much like km animal it appears that this was filmed before the attack and that the entire thing was staged and if it truly was a king cobra then it's likely that the puppy was killed while they were filming this video and are inconsistencies with all of these snake videos leading me to believe that most of these dogs are dying or being severely injured during these staged scenes now i'm sure you guys get the point already but if you're still on the fence here's this on august 13th the channel posted a video of a cat being attacked by a snake in a tree it's very graphic so i won't show it all but at one point we see this random kitten standing on the tree this is significant because somehow just three days later the same exact kitten wound up stuck inside of a fence for them to rescue you can tell for sure that it's the same kitten by the pattern on its back what are the chances of that randomly seeing a cat at an animal rescue and then having to rescue that same kitten just a few days later again this shows us that this channel seems to be fake which makes these videos so concerning because i failed to mention that this channel also shows videos of dogs with broken legs thanks to supposed car accidents and puppies caught in mousetraps whose legs wound up mangled assuming that this channel is faking these videos then this would mean that they are intentionally mangling these puppies for their content and the fact that we've seen some of these dogs get bit by actual king cobras then we already know that they are likely killing these dogs for content as well now when i was investigating this channel i happened to find a comment on one of their videos from an account named the rescue journey tv and what i found on that channel was virtually a mere image of the two that we've discussed so far except this one might be even more shameless this channel has very similar red flags to happy dog with one of the biggest being their obvious attempt to follow views a year ago one of their videos showed a kitten trapped in between the wheels of a truck with a video gaining a staggering 11 million views now just a few months after that a similar video was posted that showed another kitten rescued from the tires with a similar thumbnail and this one got 31 million views and much like the snakes on the happy dog channel the people at rescue journey tv likely saw how well these rescues were doing and started doing them more to gain views as in the following week two more videos would be posted of the same exact type of rescue it's pretty ridiculous to believe that this could happen three times in the span of one week because in a lot of ways it doesn't even make sense how these kittens would get stuck there in the first place also i just want to quickly mention that the last two videos they did on this specific type of rescue severely underperformed and interestingly enough after those videos did so poorly there hasn't been a similar rescue since so what happened so often that they had three of the same rescue in one week yet since the views ran dry there hasn't been another one in the past seven months again i feel like this all hints to the idea that this is staged in an attempt to chase views i also want to add that each of the thumbnails that they used for these types of rescues were photoshopped with them adding blood to make the video more clickable further exploiting these situations for their own gain but it gets worse because when i said it was shameless i meant it because this channel seems to be quote unquote saving the same cats and dogs over and over again for example in one video they find a kitten trapped in rubble and then a week later he finds another cat stuck in a tree and if you pause the video and look a little closer the cat has the same exact markings on its back it's the same kitten much like the tactic that happy dogs used except they do it over and over again they use the same animals as props for their videos to act like they're saving them and knowing these are staged is terrifying as this channel features videos of dogs and kittens drowning and being crushed by rubble meaning that they're likely putting these animals through all of that and if you had any doubts that this channel is faked here's the kicker many of his videos start with this guy just casually farming minding his own business and miraculously every single time after just a few seconds he happens to hear an animal in distress in the nearby area like how dumb do they think we are and what are the odds that as soon as the camera turns on an animal randomly starts crying out for help which also just so happens to be what your entire channel is centered around now i go a little more in depth on this channel but it seems like a lot of their commenters have already caught on to the scam so i'll just leave it at that both happy dog and the rescue journey tv are two of the most sickening channels that i've ever encountered and somehow they are allowed to continue posting this content on youtube all the while there are ads on virtually every single video this is quite literally monetized animal abuse and we've seen their willingness to chase views and put these animals in more and more extreme situations so who knows what other types of abuse though put them through next it's honestly horrifying to think that this will keep happening and keep getting worse and worse until hopefully they're eventually stopped and these are far from the only channels out there like this so for that reason i'm going to keep investigating this in the future and trying to expose this issue as this truly has no place on the platform

Channel: Nick Crowley

Views: 5,338,746

Rating: 4.948071 out of 5

Keywords: YouTube's Fake Animal Rescue Channels, YouTubes Fake Animal Rescue, Fake Animal Rescue YouTube Channel, Fake Animal Rescue, Animal Abuse on YouTube, Happy Dog, KM Animal, The Rescue Journey TV, rescue journey tv, fake animal rescue channels, animal rescue fake, dog rescue, cat rescue, fake

Id: p7nVntZpJLM

Length: 22min 49sec (1369 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 22 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Barnicle75]

Gonna be hard to extract comedy out of this. But Ethan did say he wanted to try new things....

[u/Mydadisbi69]

Please tell me the dodo videos aren't staged or I'll have a heart attack