animals

Frans de Waal's TED talk shows videos of behavioral experiments on primates and other mammals that reveal empathy, cooperation, fairness and reciprocity. He argues these moral traits are not uniquely human.

A BBC Weird Nature clip about vervet monkeys in the Caribbean that drink alcohol, and how they split into heavy drinkers, social drinkers and teetotalers.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews Andrej Karpathy on why reinforcement learning is flawed, why AGI may blend into steady GDP growth, why self-driving took so long, and the future of education. The conversation runs about two and a half hours.

CGP Grey explains why horses could be ridden and why other animals like zebras and bears were never domesticated for war or riding. It is a follow-up on the topic of animal domestication.

Kedi is a feature documentary following seven street cats of Istanbul and the people who care for them. It portrays the relationship between the city and its cats.

A viral nature-documentary parody in which a narrator gives a profane, deadpan commentary over footage of a honey badger attacking snakes, including a cobra bite and recovery. It became the source of the 'honey badger don't care' meme.

Dominion is a two-hour documentary using drones and hidden cameras to expose conditions in animal agriculture, including food, clothing, entertainment and research. It questions humanity's dominion over animals.

Douglas Adams gives a talk at UCSB, recorded shortly before his death, about the odd lives of animals and what they suggest about humanity's future. It draws on his Last Chance to See work and is funny and wide-ranging.

A one-minute clip of a crow repeatedly sliding down a snowy roof on a small lid, apparently just for fun.

A Kurzgesagt video on the conditions in which most farm animals are raised. It argues that cruelty is for cheaper rather than better meat, and that a small price increase per meal could avoid most of the suffering.

A one-minute clip from a cat cafe in Japan where sleeping cats wake and look around just before an earthquake begins shaking the room.

A short Discovery nature clip from North America showing a red fox listening for field mice under the snow and then diving headfirst to catch them. The narration says the fox uses its hearing and the Earth's magnetic field to aim its jump.

A condensed film of Dick Proenneke's footage of building a cabin and living alone in the Alaskan wilderness, using hand tools and local materials. It draws on the 8mm films he shot himself.

A clip from Attenborough's Life of Mammals following a San tribesman in the Kalahari on an eight-hour persistence hunt, running down a kudu through harsh heat. It shows tracking, endurance running and the hunter's reaction after the kill.

The first part of Dmitry Vasyukov's four-part Russian documentary series about trappers and villagers living in the Siberian taiga. This episode follows spring life along the Yenisei, with hunting, fishing and subsistence in harsh surroundings.

Vegan advocate Erin Janus explains the dairy industry in about five minutes, covering how milk is produced and the treatment of cows and calves. It is an advocacy piece and includes graphic material.

Veritasium explains how trees lift water from roots to the top of tall trunks, using transpiration pull and the negative pressure that liquid water can sustain. It explains why trees do not need pumps or valves.

Fools & Dreamers is a 30-minute documentary about Hinewai Nature Reserve in New Zealand, where botanist Hugh Wilson let gorse grow as a nurse canopy to regenerate native forest. It shows the results after 30 years and the local skepticism he faced.

Kurzgesagt compares how many people nuclear accidents have killed against other energy sources. It walks through the worst nuclear accidents and puts their death tolls in context per unit of energy.

A DIY demonstration of a fan-and-screen mosquito trap that uses carbonated water as a CO2 attractant. The creator reports catching about 8,000 mosquitoes in two nights.

A long video essay arguing that Koko the gorilla probably could not actually use sign language. It examines the cherry-picked data and the lack of transparency behind the claims, drawing on published critiques.

George Monbiot narrates how reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone after about 70 years set off a trophic cascade. The wolves changed deer behavior, vegetation recovered, and rivers changed course.

A Vox explainer on how the wildlife trade and wet markets are linked to coronavirus and why new diseases keep emerging in China. It stresses that most people in China do not eat wildlife.

Maggie Mae Fish analyzes the documentary My Octopus Teacher as an eco-horror film, critiquing it as a story of a man projecting his own needs onto a wild animal.

Mark Rober digs into bed bugs, testing popular beliefs about where they come from and how to get rid of them. It mixes entertaining experiments with research-based advice on what works and what does not.

A Royal Institution lecture in which Nicholas Humphrey presents his theory of phenomenal consciousness and its evolution. He draws on the book Sentience and discusses evidence for animal sentience.

Destin of Smarter Every Day films a cat falling in high-speed slow motion to show how cats right themselves in midair, and introduces the physics behind it.

A three-minute clip from BBC's Planet Earth narrated by David Attenborough about Cordyceps, the fungus that infects insects and takes over their behavior. It shows an infected ant and its demise.

A silent PLOS ONE video of New Caledonian crows solving Aesop's Fable puzzles by dropping objects to raise water and reach food. It shows example trials from experiments testing causal understanding of water displacement.

A short BBC clip in which David Attenborough shows a lyrebird imitating sounds, including camera shutters, car alarms and chainsaws. It comes from the BBC natural history series Life on Earth.

A BBC Earth clip from Inside the Animal Mind in which a crow named 007 solves an eight-step puzzle to get a reward. It showcases crow problem-solving.

A short BBC Earth clip from David Attenborough's Life of Birds showing a lyrebird imitating sounds, including a chainsaw and camera shutter, so accurately it is hard to tell from the real thing.

A BBC Earth clip from The Hunt showing Portia jumping spiders, which leap many times their body length and ambush prey larger than themselves.

A short narrated video describing how reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone triggered a trophic cascade that changed wildlife, vegetation and even river courses. This is a remastered HD version of George Monbiot's viral piece.

An episode of Journey to the Microcosmos, hosted by Hank Green, about diatoms, single-celled algae with glass shells. It covers their role in producing a large share of Earth's oxygen and their uses in beer filtering, paint and kitty litter.

Benn Jordan's video about storing a PNG image in a living bird, a starling that learns to reproduce encoded sounds. It mixes ornithology, audio engineering, and data encoding.

A short excerpt from Frans de Waal's TED talk showing a capuchin monkey fairness experiment in which two monkeys are paid unequally, one with cucumber and one with grapes. The shortchanged monkey reacts angrily.

Maker's Muse designs a 3D-printed and laser-cut puzzle box to test whether wild sulphur-crested cockatoos can solve it. He documents how the birds work it out.

Atrocity Guide covers the 1965 dolphin experiments of Dr. John C. Lilly and Margaret Howe, who tried to teach dolphins English. It traces the bizarre methods and Lilly's later drug-fueled beliefs.

An Adam Ruins Everything segment arguing that purebred dogs suffer from inbreeding and genetic disorders, and that mutts are healthier. It follows the show's comedic debunking style.