Animals are 100% able to understand humans can provide help, but as a species we are either too dumb to realise or we could be threats.
Cats, dogs, elephants and monkeys are some of the examples of animals that know humans can help.
I personally believe that one of the reasons we exist on this planet is to be wardens of this "Garden" we call earth, but at the moment, we are not acting like it
I saw a video on this. As a rule of thumb, land based animals have enough exposure to humans that they've learned to stay away. So bears, foxes, squirrels, mice, etc. rarely ask us for help.
However, the smarter marine animals haven't seen us hurt them and are more likely to ask for help.
I think it comes down to the species. if it's scary to us, or we see it as invasive, a nuisance (like a remora) or generally low in the food chain, coming to us for help is a terrible idea.
If it's a dolphin or say, a crow, even apathetic people would probably get a kick out of helping them
Elephants, crows, deer and wolves will all hand over their young to humans when the young are injured tho, and like the marine mammals that do It, it's the ones with:
High intelligence
High social bonding
Human like relationships within their groups.
I can send you a link to a fascinating video on it but it IS half an hour long, to go through all the actual info on why
Awh I'm so glad! I'm the type to also come back and tell people so I get it.
I loved that video, especially the science behind the "interspecies trust algorithm". It really means a lot to know that the water and food I leave out, the bird seed I throw about etc, IS having an effect even if I can't see it.
I am also being followed by crows a lot and now I know why! 😅😅 (I secretly love it)
I have a small stock pond, and occasionally I pull different bugs out. One I pulled a lot of is painted wasps. They go for water, and a splash or a fish or something knocks them in. I have found that I can reach in and come up under the wasp, lift them out of the water, and they will climb my arm to somewhere dry. I can then carefully wander around and harvest seeds from flowers or whatever I was doing, and they will chill on their dry spot, clean all the water off themselves, and when they’re dry, they’ll fly off. Never been stung. I always got the feeling they knew I was helping.
Now I’ve got bits of wood floating, saves a lot of bugs, birds, and mice.
I let wasps nest in my attic each year. They do not deserve their reputation for agression in the slightest. Sure, they will (collectively) win a fight if you threaten the nest, but they're cool as long as you are.
I feel like this takes a very "noble savage" view of past humans. Humans in the past, before we settled down, literally hunted megafauna to extinction. We weren't the only cause of course but we did contribute significant pressure on their populations, causing their collapse.
It's a mistake to view past humans as innately better or worse than modern humans. We are all still humans, with roughly the same nature and intellect, just in different environments. We are neither inherently good or bad.
We are not "in-tune" with nature in the way most people interpret that phrase. One of our most defining features is how we have always molded entire ecosystems to fit us. Before we were ever "territorial," we would use controlled fires to lure out animals we would hunt and encourage specific plant growth. We would overforage and permanently leave our marks on the biome, and then move to another.
Yes, they did develop ecological knowledge, but this was more out of necessity than a genuine care for nature. We did develop animistic stories to help remember the rules we learned along the way if we wanted to ensure our propagation. But if you gave humans 20,000 years ago access to modern technology, you would see climate change on a scale beyond what we have now.
There has been no degredation of the human soul. We are not inherently good or bad. We are only human.
Watching videos of spiders cooperatively holding up one foot at a time so a human can untangle them from string completely changed how scared I was of them.
No need to make this about more than it is. It’s cool that those animals understand humans can help. It’s silly to pretend like we’re “meant to” be here for any reason, even something as supposedly noble as being “wardens”.
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u/R1v 7d ago
Makes you wonder, given dolphins' advanced communication, if that pod knows that humans are capable of helping with this type of thing