Do Animals Remember Human Faces. #stickmananimation #storytime #animal #AnimalFacts #stickman

straight to the part of the brain that handles threats. They had never met this human. They had seen one picture of them in a bad mood, and they had already decided to keep an eye on them. A horse can hold your worst moment against you, from a photograph before you have said a single word, and that is a big mammal with a big brain. Surely something with almost no brain at all would be safe to ignore you. Think again. An octopus has no bones, three hearts, blue blood, and most of its brains spread out through its arms. It is about as close to an alien as anything on this planet. It can still pick you out of a crowd. In one experiment, a tank of octopuses met two keepers in identical uniforms. One fed them. The other poked them with a bristly stick. It did not take long. The octopuses started reaching out for the nice keeper and shrinking away from the mean one, and they began aiming a hard jet of water at the one they had learned to dislike. In another lab, an octopus took against one staff member for no reason anyone could see, and soaked her with a blast of water down the neck every time she walked past. A creature with a mind, nothing like ours, looking up at a human and thinking, not you again. So far, every one of these is a grudge. But memory cuts both ways, and this is where it gets beautiful. Back to the crows because a crow keeps two lists, one for the people it cannot forgive, and one for the people it loves. In Seattle, a little girl named Gabby started feeding the crows in her yard when she was four. Scraps on the way to the bus, a full bird bath, every day like clockwork, and the crows started paying her back. They left her gifts on the feeder, beads, buttons, and earring, a shard of polished glass, and a tiny piece of metal stamped with the word "best" like half of a friendship charm. Crows do not normally do this. Most people who feed them get nothing but more crows. Gabby got treasures. Then her mother lost a lens cap in a nearby alley. Days later, it turned up on the feeder right where the crows leave their gifts. They had found the thing her family lost and carried at home. To those crows, Gabby was not a random kid in a yard. She was a face worth keeping, so animals remember the faces that fed them, and the faces that hurt them. But how long can a memory like that actually last? For that, look at the animals closest to us. Chimpanzees and bonobos read faces almost exactly the way you do, and they almost never let one go. In one study, apes were shown photos of old groupmates and people they had not seen in years, and their attention went straight to the familiar face. One bonobo picked out relatives she had not seen in 26 years. That is the longest face memory ever recorded in any animal but us. They have even recognized specific humans after decades apart, with half the face hidden behind a mask and still known exactly who they were. To an ape, a face you showed at once can still be seen.