what do this bird watcher
neuroscientist and the inventor of
elephant prosthetics
share they all build unique bonds with
animals
high five meet the people giving them a
leg up
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i am attracted to the bluebirds
because of their beauty
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my name is al larsen i'm
97 years old or young
these bluebirds are about 11 days old
i've helped over 40 000 nestlings
every living thing has just as much
right to live
as i do
i'm a bird watcher by choice i guess
when i retired in the late
70s last 1970s i came upon this article
in national geographic and i became
aware of
the plight of the bluebird their
population has been declining
and the importance of the nest box to
the survival of the bluebirds and i
thought well why don't i
try that here so one of the first nest
boxes i set up a bluebird moved into it
and immediately hey success
i should put up more boxes
oh this is a second nest you can see
different material built
on top there well i'll go on to the next
box now
see what's going on there
these nest boxes that i use are ones
that i
built at home i came up with a solution
of
building the box as simply as possible
cheap to build with just four sides a
bottom
and a roof anybody could build it even
kids
over the years i have added more than
350 nest boxes out
my bluebird trails cover quite an area
in southwest idaho
actually i've got a trail in each of
five different counties
i monitor the boxes regularly to
record the data of what goes on with the
development of the nesting cycle of the
bluebirds
i've shared my data with boise state
university
the abandoning laboratory at patuxent
maryland
and anybody else who requested
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pretty little bluebird where do you go
come back come back to me
i'm going says a bird as he flew on high
to see if my color matches the sky
i'm gratified to know that i've helped
the bluebirds
increase their population i'm gratified
to know that through the
work i've done i've inspired many many
other people to help not only bloopers
but
other creatures as well so maybe i've
been put here to help our environment
my message is you've got to be active if
you're going to get old
don't uh crawl into a cocoon because you
might not break out of it
so think about the future and what you
can do tomorrow
plan ahead
give me a hug yes i know that's good
do some training i work with dogs to
train them to go into an mri scanner and
try to figure out what makes them tick
and what they're thinking
my name is gregory burns i'm a
neuroscientist at emory university in
atlanta georgia
i've grown up with dogs and i've lived
with dogs pretty much my whole life
one of my favorite dogs had passed away
in the back of my mind i started
wondering
did that dog love me in the way that i
loved him
and that was really the beginning of it
all of these basic things that we've
begun to sort out in humans at least in
human brains we want to do in dogs if
dogs can be trained
to go into an mri machine then maybe we
could figure out what they're actually
thinking
so we have a dog in the scanner that's
katie and
she is a veteran of the project this is
probably about
the 15th time she's done this
just having the idea of okay well let's
train dogs to go on the scanner
it wasn't immediately apparent how you
would go about
doing that and and mri scanners are
not the most pleasant environments
okay hey cal coyle good girl
callie is the little black terrier who
was the first dog to train for the dog
project
high five i built a simulator of an mri
so this is the simulator that i built
here in my basement
then we started adding in recordings of
the scanner noise which is actually
quite loud
we just started working with you know
treats and positive reinforcement to see
if we could get her to go into this
thing
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that actually proved to be pretty easy
and then so what we did was we kind of
put out word of mouth do you want to
join this project you want to train your
dogs for an mri and you know maybe
figure out what they're thinking
the purpose of this is to go through a
number of exercises including
basic obedience as well as how they
react to the obstacles
when we hold the tryouts it lets us weed
out the dogs that we don't think would
enjoy
doing this one of the benefits then of
having
more participants as it gives you
statistical power you can
start to average dogs brains together
and get a better sense for what's
happening
i started wondering very seriously if we
could really finally answer this
question do dogs
essentially like us just for the social
bond and
not about the food and what we found was
looking at the reward system
that almost all the dogs had equal
responses both to food
as well as praise and even a few dogs
like the praise more
the things that we were finding about
the dog's brain in many ways
confirm i think what people know in
their hearts about
how dogs behave and why they behave
the way i think about dogs is in many
ways they're the ambassadors to the
animal
world they're not that different from
many of the other mammals out there and
so i suspect that a lot of what we find
in dogs
probably holds true for pretty much any
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mammal
musha lost a leg
when she was two years old from landmine
i thought that i should do something for
her
dr turchai chirakat is working with the
world's first elephant hospital
located in thailand since it opened
more than 4 000 injured and sick
elephants have been treated
i'm the first one who invented the
artificial leg for the
elephant
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using his knowledge as an orthopedic
surgeon dr tur chai
designed mousha's artificial limb when
she was just a baby
accounting for the elephant's weight and
size
as she has grown pressure on the
prosthetic has increased
causing it to break so a new one is
created every few years
this is a challenge for me too every
time we fix it we
improve it it's more sturdy
stronger this you know
in the textbook sometimes try and early
when she obeys me gave her candy
and she know where the candy is she used
a trunk to
go into the pocket
she knew
i did operation on her food
about 15 years ago but she she
remembered me
she liked to come closer to me she
showed a sign of
salute or happy
i think it means so much for her
she can live a normal life
as she should be
in the middle of a political upheaval
one ukrainian zookeeper set out to make
a difference
in his own way on the private estate of
an ousted president
sergey used to be a zoologist at the
kiev's zoo
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one night in 2014 he was watching the
news and learned that amidst the chaos
ukrainian president viktor yanukovych
had fled his compound in mejuhira
leaving his private zoo behind
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you
when he arrived sergey was stunned by
the huge opulent estate and saw the
animals needed desperate care
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he
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today sergey and a handful of volunteers
take care of thousands of animals on the
estate
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level
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the zoo is slowly growing and sergey has
big hopes for the future
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is
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is
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actually
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foreign
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foreign