Human voice recordings have been found to scare wildlife in Greater Kruger National Park (South Africa) even more than the roar of lions or the sound of gunfire.
In The Book of Merlyn, children’s author T.H. White noted that humans instill more fear in animals than tigers, which he correlated with the violent war tendencies of humankind.
Large animals flee from human voices. The clip shows a leopard even dropping its hard-to-catch prey – (Image: LIANA ZANETTE)
More than 80 years later, science has now confirmed White’s observation, although researchers have compared humans to lions, referred to as the “king of beasts,” according to the science news outlet IFL Science.
The lead researcher, Dr. Liana Zanette from Western University (Canada), and her colleagues played recordings of lion roars, human voices, dog barks, and gunshots for the mammals in Greater Kruger National Park, which is home to one of the largest remaining lion populations in the world.
For the human voices, researchers used audio recordings from radios and TVs in the four most commonly spoken languages in the area, played at conversational volume.
The recordings were played while the animals approached waterholes to drink.
From various observations, the team discovered that animals were able to flee from the waterholes twice as fast when they heard human voices.
Specifically, when hearing human voices, lions fled 40% faster than usual. All other species tended to run away from human sounds faster than lions. Elephants, in particular, became enraged and sought out the sound source, destroying the devices before leaving faster than the lions.
Moreover, the roar of lions made animals more terrified than the sounds of gunfire and dog barking.
For animals in Africa, human voices are scarier than lions – (Image: SHUTTERSTOCK).
“I think the widespread fear among mammals in the savanna is evidence of the environmental impact that humans cause,” Zanette stated.
According to her, this is a dangerous signal showing that animals react very strongly to humans. They fear humans more than any other predator.
After all, lions only kill what they can eat, whereas some humans will kill a rhinoceros solely for its horn, which is used in ineffective medicines.
This study was published in the journal Current Biology.
