The most frightening sound for wild animals was the human voice

Canadian scientists have concluded that human speech scares wild animals much more than the roar of lions and many other sounds.

Liana Zanette from the University of Western Ontario and her colleagues installed cameras and loudspeakers in the Kruger National Park in South Africa, through which they broadcast various sounds: a lion’s roar, a dog barking, the sound of gunfire, birdsong and human speech. The sound volume was 60 decibels.

Having compared 15 thousand videos with 19 species of predatory and herbivorous animals, scientists came to the conclusion that almost all animals ignored the voices of birds, and they were about equally afraid of dog barking, gunshots and the roar of lions. Animals ran away from human speech approximately twice as often and twice as fast as from “lions.”

The lions themselves did not escape any sounds. In the case of the “lions,” the elephants prepared to defend themselves, but ran away from the “people.”

The results, according to scientists, indicate that ordinary tourists scare wild animals more than predators, and only slightly less than hunters with dogs. This may mean that tourists in protected areas have a greater impact on animals than previously thought.