How to Spot FAKE Animal Rescue Videos

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1. If you have a concern that an animal rescue video is staged, and that animals are intentionally being placed in harmful situations so that they can be "rescued," I strongly recommend reporting the channel to the Social Media Animal Cruelty Coalition linked here: https://www.smaccoalition.com/report-a-concern

2. Love the fake rescue videos with clips of completely different people taking care of completely different animals. Once saw a video that claimed some dude "raised an orphaned baby wolf" and a few of the clips were baby coyotes, others wolves, some were straight up normal dogs. Every clip had a completely different dude as well. They don't even try to make it convincing lol.

3. There are also footages that downright "Disney-fy" nature. One video showed a sea otter "hugging" a small shark while the narration went on and on about how they were "friends" and the shark was "happy to feel love for the first time".

   Uhhhh no. The two are FIGHTING. Sea otters are predators too and they will hunt and eat small sharks. The two weren't playing haippily, the otter was intending to have the shark for dinner!

4. I have helped rescue animals before, guinea pigs, cats, and even bunnies. I am not a registered rescue, just a passionate animal lover wanting to help the animals who worked with a rescue along side each situation. I can assure you each one I've done, I didn't have time to record footage for a video. My time went to actually nursing each species until the rescue was able to pick up or me drop off. it is frustrating to see so many people try to pose as "rescue when they're actually doing more harm than good

5. there is so many of fake story, I'm horrified to see the number of people who believe in it and comment (99%). These are video montages with images and videos of other situations.
   But the worst are the false saves, I reported it many times to youtube and many other people too, but nothing is deleted. It is often about channels in Asia, which drug and make cats and dogs suffer. They pretend to save them in order to scam people who believe in it and make money donations. We rarely see the faces of the "rescuers" and the animals are sometimes the same in other videos (a kitten saved and 6 months + later, the same still "saved"). The cat moms are drugged, the newborns are put in bags in the water and "saved", the dogs are glued or attached and hung on the motorcycles then "saved" as if by chance!
   And they are taken to a fake vet who injects a fake product. We never see the animal again and the savior finds animals every week, strange! Whereas before he only made videos about food or different stuff. And these people have several youtube accounts and so-called rescue associations. 99% of the comments believe it and gave money! But it is really a visible scam! Similar animals, sometimes with lots of fake blood on the floor. It’s abhorrent, the animals are drugged and mistreated! And they probably end up in the soup!

6. Thanks for doing this video … People need to be aware that to many of these rescue videos are staged. Especially in Asian countries. They've learned that gullible cat or dog people will shower them with money to help save the poor animal. Be cautious, and don't be taken!

7. Yea I hate those obvious fake animal rescues I know that they've put their own pet in peril just to get a viral vid, I hate that, I don't even like real animal rescues I don't want to see an animal suffer even if it turns out well lin the end.

8. They're like Chinese trying to create viral vids, you can tell by the weird use of words and grammar and they use an ai voiceover so they sound western.

9. I saw the same video before watching this one, and I knew that it was fake. And I commented: “Cool how the mother changed colors”

10. i’m also so worried about these including newborn kittens that the person probably hurt the kittens or killed one to make it seem like something tragic happened it really breaks my heart

11. Also don't trust AI generated videos with very bad English!
    The reason that they use AI is to hide the fact that they are third world scammers who can't speak English.

12. Don't trust anything with AI generated voices!! The reason they do that is to hide that they can't speak English correctly, but want to profit from an international audience.
    Beware!

13. Try to remain calm while watching this challenge (impossible)

14. Thank you for this, I always find these kinds of videos suspicious if I can tell there isn't continuity, so glad you're educating people on that.

    Also you have no idea how happy I am about the fact that you can tell the difference between a sea and river otter even as pups

15. FINALLY someone made a video on this Ai slop. I saw some fake lizard “rescue” and it showed 8 DIFFERENT SPECIES

16. I hate these AI narrated videos. They always make it seem like these animals can understand human speech and humanize them. And you can always tell it’s fake when they show two different animals from 2 different videos.

17. Another issue these fake videos cause is they cause people to interact with protected species (like sea otters) they think they’re “rescuing” or that it’s harmless to do so. This is a problem because: 1) no matter how friendly they appear, they are still wild animals and thus, unpredictable and 2) it is illegal to touch them as a regular civilian

18. This is what I keep telling my friends that theese videos are fake but they won't listen I am going to share this video with them

19. What happens if people know about the issues of staged animal rescues & wildlife harassment, yet use that as an excuse to act like bigots & know-it-alls towards others on what they should or should not do (that's what PETA did with their snide remark towards Steve Irwin)?

20. Hi @KPassionate on this note, I have a question. Is there any update on any confirmed answers for hvaldimir’s death? From what I understand hvaldimir and his death was a huge controversial issue and I have read tons of people swerving to this claim and tons of people swerving to the extreme opposite, and then fighting viciously that their claim is the correct one and “justice be done”. There is a particular source of whom won’t be named who keeps insisting that hvaldimir was shot and his death was a murder and they keep screaming that we “must do justice for him”, they also state medical post-mortem sources that I quote, “suspect those are likely to be gun wounds” but so far, as per your point about unreliable sources, all I’ve read so far are speculation nothing concrete. The last factual update I have had on hvaldimir is that the final necropsy was inconclusive and the police refused to do further investigations. I have seen your video on hvaldimir, thank you very much! However you did state that you weren’t informed of the full results of the necropsy in your second video so I would like to ask if you have more updates on this. I ask as you are clearly a trusted source who is unbiased and factual. I’ve been reading too much information from sources who just spread emotional hubris on hvaldimir screaming tragedy that he must be avenged and making his story their own! Utterly horrible. Thank you very much for your rational level-headed input! Respect!

21. 7:37

22. But I thought whales liked being petted.

    Oh, fair enough, making them fear boats less leading to more deadly whale incidents is understandable.

    So if I were to interact with a whale, I might do it, but only in the water, not on a vessel.

    At least that would guarantee that it’s the whale’s decision.

23. 5:38 this is why i always ask "what is that on the animal" always before tryna remove it -_-

24. I got you the 1,200th like!

25. There are so many "rescue" videos out there that post misinformation and steal donations, which would've gone to actual charities and non-profit organizations that rescue and reabilitate animals. Those channels are still up, and youtube refuses to do anything about it. There is no report for animal endangerment. Which there should be. All we can do is report channels for spam, dangerous activities and misinformation.

26. If an animal rescue video came from a developing country or in china, I don't trust them

27. So many fake rescue videos

28. Oh my god ive been liking these cruel videos ive loved animals forever and i only just found out these are fake so sorry i didnt rlly notice ill make sure to fact check and find out info if its real or not next time. Tysm for teaching me!

29. I try not to watch any "rescue" vid other than the actual rescue group's post.
    plus, anything from south east Asia is a big sus.
    Thank you for sharing what to do if we spot any of these animal abuse videos cuz I just saw one right before your vid and was furious.

30. MOST animal rescue and animal feel good vids (like the cat paying for fish with a leaf) are totally fake. The algorithm LOVES fake animal rescue vids.

    So, besides the ai narrated or created stories, people also are deliberately putting animals in dangerous or stressful situations trying to create a viral vid.

    There's a channel where a guy's entire library is the same little monkey being rescued from various situations.

    The cat with the leaf was from pictures stolen off reddit and then the BS story made up.

    PLEASE watch animal rescue vids and animal feel good vids with your head first and heart second. Sharing and commenting up fake content encourages it and puts more animals in danger.

    Thank you for bringing up this topic.

31. What you describe I'm sure is true but aren't there other videos that are even worse because because they are posing as people who are helping starving and injured animals when in fact they are the ones causing the harm. Why not expose them also?😢

32. Thank you. We really need more guidelines for faked animal videos.
    I'm especially concerned about videos where they make different species of animals interact.
    I believe those are a product of experimentation, and that there may be a number of "unfortunate incidents" as a result of that practice.
    Bookmarked that link.

33. I’m happy to be an animal lover but also an animal nerd. A lot of people don’t know any better and wouldn’t even think about if barnacles would naturally be on tortoises or if they harmed whales or not.

34. thank you so very much for doing this. It has gotten really bad. Even the 'a kitten followed me home' type videos make me wonder. Here in Japan there was a guy who 'found' a kitten covered in glue.. rescued it, spent weeks removing the glue etc.. his views went up and up, and people donated a lot, the kitten recovered… his views started dropping… then the kitten died suddenly in some mysterious way.. and not a week later he had 'found' another kitten. I am too scared to look at the channel now. I have most of the Vietnamese animal rescue channels blocked too.

35. The fake AI voiceover videos are irritating, but at least they use clips rather than staging “rescues.”
    The “rescue” videos that show animal abuse being committed are the truly infuriating ones

36. I have reported numerous "rescue" channels to YouTube, especially those from the Asian countries like Vietnam and Thailand. The one channel was absolutely so terrible, they used puppies and kittens and put them in all kinds of peril, like at the back of a clearly hand dug hollow and put a snake in there as well. These people are without conscience.

37. All these videos like the otter one, are different videos put together to form a "emotional" story to draw clicks. They often use Messi the Puma who lives in Russia in various stories of how he was "rescued" There as so many different stories about him. 🙄

38. Use common sense.

39. Comment for the algorithm… It is so sad, that those fake animal videos get so many views but the important ones like this go unnoticed.

40. Thanks for making this video and educating people on this topic. I have come across a lot of fake animal rescuing videos too and I usually only notice it because of the editing cutting back and forth to different animals like you mentioned. I wished we could tell before clicking on the video though so these people don't get any attention or views.

41. How to spot a fake video… First video: well if your alarm bells don't go off when hearing the way this guy talks…….. If the things he says do not make you cringe? Then you might be less of an animal friend you thought, spend some more time in animal & nature knowledge instead of watching a video for your own emotion comfort!!!

42. I have seen several fox rescue videos, you can tell it is just clips taken from several different videos, different foxes. One clip used was from the famous "Bisquit.

43. I always leave a FAKE STORY comment. There are so many gullible people who fall for these stories and the liar gets to pocket money from You Tube.

44. KP, since you mentioned some rescue organizations on the west coast, I’d like to mention the Clearwater Marine Aquarium in Clearwater, FL. I was a volunteer there for 5 years. They rescue, rehab and release marine mammals, sea turtles, manatees and others. The aquarium took a lot of damage from Helene, but has reopened. Their marine mammal rehab facility, however, sustained a lot of damage and won’t be able to be used for rehabs for a long time.

45. THANK YOU!!! These fake, tear-jerky clips are one of the vilest things on YouTube. And not only are the creators responsible for epic-scale content theft, they actually HARM legit rescues by suggesting that "everything will just be OK". But it seldom is. Legit animal rescue operations LOSE donations thanks to the prevalence of these rotten things. And we never see the countless rescues that go horribly wrong in these pirate clips because, in THEIR imaginary world, that never happens.

    YouTube potentially has ways to shut these down, but it's yet another problem that they actively ignore unless/until actual AUP violations are pointed out. Fact is, fake rescues make money for YT in terms of clicks…so why stop them?

    It's appalling. It needs to stop.

46. There are so many fake animal videos and it's just another way of scamming people.. they steal different clips and merge them together with a fake story, and the worst thing is that youtube doesn't even ban them..

47. All the monkeys trapped in mid videos too. Ppl traumatizing monkeys for views

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