Zookeepers, What Was The Most Human-Like Behaviour From An Animal? (AskReddit)

is the keepers of Reddit what's the most human-like behavior you've witnessed an animal display I want to be as a keeper so I did a volunteer Finn German Jagger at the San Diego safari park our instructor was an elephant trainer she said it's normal for the sea keepers to leave dead elephants in their enclosure for a day or two so the elephants can mourn the loss of an elephant cries standing around the body signs of depression my dog once thanked me he was trying to find a comfortable position on his palate but it was already melted over itself so after he grumpily plopped down I went over and tugged at the corner of it my dog looked at me and then got up I fixed it for him and he laid down so I went to sit down a beat later my dog got up and walked over to me he lick my knee and went back to lay down that's one of the reasons that I considered my dog was a person instead of an animal I work at the San Diego Zoo and the Peacocks love attention they fan out their feathers at routine times every single day in the same exact spots just for the crowds of people to come and give them attention they do this with no pigeons in sight it's kind of funny during penguin nesting season I once saw a rock up a couple who had built a nest way up high at the top of a mountain of rocks the lady of the house decided that she needed to redecorate the home and send the mail to find a suitable rock to add to the decor as he hopped down the rocks he was squawked at and pected by several other octopus with nests getting beat up all the way down to the ground where he started looking for pebbles he finds one he likes and ascends up the mountain to once again brave the very territorial biting screeching rock Appa's along the way she lays the pebble down for his missus and she slaps the [ __ ] out of him she hates it immediately getting the point he returns for a third pass of now even more pissed off rock her purse back to the ground this time he's not playing he spends a good ten minutes looking for a rock that he likes and boom there it is he tries to pick the rock up and immediately drops it he tries again drops it he tries one final time it's just too big for him to carry so his response he throws his head back flails his flippers about and cries to the sky I did not see him return home for the rest of my shift I worked in South Africa for a bit last year we have four giraffes on the prepare II one of which was a lovely lady named Camille one day they were roaming at the fence neighboring the farm next door where a kudu named Charles lived Google what a few doers they are cool-looking camilan Charles absolutely fell in love four days they stayed at the fence and wouldn't leave finally Charles decided he'd had enough he jumped the bagasse fence a fence large enough for a giraffe and now spends his days roaming our property with Camille the people next door were really awesome and let him stay with us finally a question I can answer while I'm not officially as a keeper yet I'm the girl in charge of scooping [ __ ] out of the Komodo dragon cage and various other reptiles mister Komodo and I have a little tradition I go into his fine establishment moth away a basketball-sized slash of excrement and taking a step away he'll immediately let it go in the same spot that I cleaned up through this isn't really what can be considered human like I'm always amused about how the moment I appear mr. Komodo spreads his legs in preparation he doesn't lash at me either which is something he does even if the person who feeds him zookeeper here seeing ring-tailed lemurs literally laid out flat on their backs on the grass on a sunny day also a lemur casually sat on a post with one knee raised and resting his own on said knee the other hand was holding on to the mesh casual as [ __ ] oh and a mandrill getting pissed off and throwing his toy away when he couldn't figure out how it worked actually as a keeper and one of our roaster lots will eat anything and everything even though he has a sensitive stomach and knows he'll puke his specialty is catching opossums or squirrels and eating everything but the head which he carefully positions in full view of the public next morning we also have a family group of Gibbons parents as AB adult and a baby in the wild young adult Gibbons stay with their parents few years and learn how to take care of their younger sibling to prepare them for Parenthood a young male who is the equivalent if a 12 to 13 year old human once tried to grab the baby from mom who smacked him upside the head she then went back to teaching the toddler to climb by sitting next to the wire of the fence letting her baby get six inches off the ground then clutching him back to her chest because that was high enough I work with exotic animals though not in a zoo yet we have a marmoset little monkey that does lots of little oddly human things but her most recent slash most creepy thing as a new method of asking for food if you've got something and you aren't sharing she'll sit in the corner of her enclosure then turn look over her shoulder and look up at you with the ground eyes until you give in or she gets mad she looks just like a little girl bribing her father we aren't really sure where she got it from we kept her were duck in our Butterfly House exhibit at my previous workplace when he was in his full glory with his beautiful colors and feathers he would be all up in everybody's face and would want attention attention attention but as soon as he bolted into his drab colors for the summer he would sulk and be cranky and hide in his pond shows off when he's pretty hides out when he's not at his best pretty human to me former Tsar keeper here I mostly worked in the reptile house and with reptiles and large rodents for educational shows however I did a bit of work with some mountain lands and a very fat black bear named TJ the mountain lands were an absolute trip because get this they played hide and seek not even 100 percent predatory behaviour they would run behind trees until you found them they are still cats with the impression that hiding their heads makes them invisible come out SWAT you on the ass and go hide behind something else TJ was one of the laziest animals I have ever met I regularly found him lying down eating food out of his dish off of his stomach Baloo style with his legs spread in the direction of the oncoming breezes I know this sounds stupid but I'm pretty sure my dog went through a grieving process and period of depression when his mom died she was 7 when she had him and he was the only puppy to survive they never spent a day apart until she died aged 15 when she died I literally think he cried like his eyes leaked maybe it was just windy that day or maybe he always does that but I never picked up on it but it broke my heart he's a very very big energetic springer spaniel and he is the best dog in the world he is a ray of sunshine and my best friend he would never do anything to hurt anybody he always wants to cuddle and play but for 2 or 3 weeks after his mom died he didn't want to play and he had no energy he only got out of his little bed to eat and drink and poop he won't even come for walks again has a very big strong dog so if you put the leash on him he'd just resist until I gave up I could hear him whimper every night until I went downstairs and stayed with him until he fell asleep it was so similar to human loneliness I brought him to the vet and she couldent find anything physically wrong with him and she put it down to grieving thankfully a year on he's the happiest dog in the world again polar bears are smart as [ __ ] they will purposely try to deceive you and even mock you bastards edit people want me to elaborate here you go you always work protected contact with polar bears sensing barriers between you and them there is usually a small gap running along the bottom which is large enough for a bear to get the front part of their paw through so you never stand up close to the stainless steel fencing the fence is usually some kind of 2x2 holes that you can pass food through and there are food shoots to mocking me one time I decided to have a play session with one of the Bears I took bucket leads which are small enough to slide under the gap I mentioned earlier and smeared them with peanut butter honey and other treats then I got on the ground in front of the pen and was zipping the lid back and forth on the ground just out of reach the bear was pouncing along and having fun and finally when I faked him out and he pounced left I shot the lid under cage to the right air hockey style he went bounding after it ate the traits and came back with it in his mouth this is the mocking part he sat down in front of me with the lid still in his mouth and just looked at me for a few seconds then he dropped the lid to the floor put a pour on it and proceeded to sing it back and forth just out of my reach like I did to him bets won keepers zero the deceiving part one bear I worked with was very sneaky and would try to trick new people they love it when you act startled so if you're a jumpy person you might as well paint a giant target on your forehead because they will try to act like they are not paying attention to you and then Randy Orton style outta nowhere leap up and hit the bars at full height and make freak out so back when I was new to this bear I accidentally dropped a fish on my side of the bars your instinct is to pick it up but that is exactly what you should not do because that puts you too close to the cage he tried to stick his poor under and get it but couldn't quite get it he tried and tried made sad puppy sounds et Cie but I ignored the fish on the ground finished our session and walked away after I got a few paces away I looked back just in time to see him stick his poor under the bars fully engulfed the fish no problem and pulled it back under and eat it now I'm not a zookeeper that I have seen animals do some pretty cool things in fifth grade we went on a school field trip to the zoo and I witnessed the most amazing trolling ever done by a gorilla so all these kids are swarming the glass of the gorilla exhibit and are banging on it because kids suck now this gorilla is sitting there taking it like a goddamn champ but then he gets up he presses his buttocks to the screen spreads his ass cheeks and begins to [ __ ] everywhere it was the most disgusting display I have ever seen but us ten year olds being 10 year olds thought it was hilarious then he begins to lick the [ __ ] off of the glass that's when everyone is grossed out of course the teachers are yelling that we needed to be mature I'm sure they were disgusted too after King Kong here is done licking his crab he pops back on the ground and just stares at us oh he knows what he's doing he begins to masturbate and bares his teeth literally a shit-eating grin the teachers dragged us off after that but we got the message that this guy wanted to be left alone I have two dogs at ten pounds sheet husband a 120 pounds Rottweiler the little one is older and missing a few bottom teeth anyway I buy them different size chewy bones the little one will take his smaller treat and go off and put it somewhere in plain sight then walk away and wait a dumb big puppy will naturally be stingy and go to grab the second bone but can't fit both in his mouth so my little dog scoops right on in and grabs the bigger one every time you think he'd learn eventually but he never does my grandfather had a brackish water pond in his backyard he would go down to fish and Joe the alligator would creep to the opposite side of the pond and scare all the fish over to my grandpa's side then like clockwork after he caught four to five fish Joe would swim closer to where my Gramps was fishing and wait for Gramps to throw him a dead fish after he ate it he would go back across the pond not as a keeper but here's a story about my cat I was snuggling up to the little fella one night my cat doesn't like being too close to anything and usually gets annoyed quickly however this one time he gave me a sideways glance with narrowed eyes I looked that plainly said he boss what do you think you're doing you [ __ ] weirdo I was in shock the look was so human you only ever see it in the eyes of people I spent that night wondering whether my cat is one of those an energy from the Harry Potter series even now if my cat is in the room I treat him as though he's human which basically means that I don't even jack off when he's home in case he understands what I'm doing and gets all grossed out the manipulation I did face painting and caricatures at a zoo not a zookeeper but we went through the same basic training all zoo employees do they wear the monkeys they seem to hate visitor staring at them all day so the ones with our enclosures a dastardly they start flipping around on the ropes that hung from above really showing off these monkeys had learned when they do this all the people come running over as fast as they can for a look once a monkey has a large crowd it pisses through the bars trying to hit as many people as possible grinning as the crowd is now all shrieking and trying to get away those bastards know what they are doing I know because one of the booths I was stationed at was right by them and several times a week I'd hear their who will die and clapping followed a few moments layer with screaming in panic I think the Rhino intentionally aimed at guests - but he didn't manipulate a crowd to come over if you see a rhino aim with its butt at the crowd foo it's like a super soaker filled worth's lumbus you do not want to be there when that thing goes off the last weird thing is the animals treat their cow Walker's differently I'm sure they recognize the uniform and associated with the people that feed the mosques that's why still it's a combination of Awesome and chilling when in a park pocket with people and the animals feigning deafness so the idiots stop making stupid noses will suddenly turn and watch you focusing on you alone among all those people most of the animals generally ignore guests but get excited and happy when they see an employee in uniform get near they act extra playful and cute kinda like cats before they get fed I have other zoo stories but they don't pertain to the question anymore so I'll just leave it at that : close bracket I know zoo keeper but there is this episode of the podcast radio lab where they talk about an orangutan named foo Manchu the story goes that foo man she would often break out of his enclosure and the zookeepers would find him in the trees outside this happened once or twice before the zookeeper starting watching the orang utans through CCTV and trying to figure out just how fu-manchu's was getting out they then observed foo man she with a makeshift key made out of wire or something that he was using to Jimmy opened the door to the enclosure and get out the sir keepers were surprised since no one had ever taught fu-manchu's this or had even done anything remotely similar in front of him foo Manchu had learned to a lock with a length of wire on his very own apparently the locksmiths Union Gate fu-manchu's an honorary membership but or an guten Tsar pretty clever and are able to build and use tools so this wasn't a very unique event so the next day they went up to flue Manchu searched him and took the key away but a few days later fu-manchu's out of his enclosure again they put him back in and searched him but there's no sign of the key so they go back to watching him on CCTV and this time they are astounded because what they see is that flue Manchu had hidden a length of wire inside his mouth wrapped inside his lower lip in the podcast they talked about why this is interesting because it means that flue Manchu was actively trying to deceive as a keeper and deception requires a much higher level of cognition as they say in the podcast deception requires that the deceiver get into the mind of the person that they are deceiving in other words it requires an animal to anticipate what a human would think and do and then actively try to fool them this kind of higher level behavior has rarely if ever been seen among animals I'm not as a keeper but I do like animals I mean come on they are awesome two instances of gorillas protecting human children come to mind both on YouTube and also reading about dolphins protecting humans too from drowning or sharks just incredible to know that some animals seem to have a sense for life and preserving it for other beings

Channel: ToadFilms

Views: 539,248

Rating: 4.9495983 out of 5

Keywords: zookeepers, zookeeper, human-like, human-like behavior, human like behavior in animals, human, like, human like, animals, reddit, askreddit, askreddit funny, top posts, top posts of r/, r/, r/askreddit, reddit top posts, reddit cringe, comedy, reddit compilation, top posts of all time, askreddit question, askreddit top posts, ask reddit, askreddit reading, subreddit, reddit stories, best of r/askreddit, funny reddit, best reddit posts, best of reddit, ToadFilms, pewdiepie

Id: 4MBkTITbStM

Length: 17min 3sec (1023 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 19 2019