An ornithology fan has gone viral in the United States after showing an unusual experiment with crows: training them to remove red caps with the motto “Make America Great Again”, a symbol associated with Donald Trump’s political movement in the United States.
According to him, the process lasted about seven months, it was shared step by step on Threads, where it accumulated millions of views and thousands of comments.
How he trained the crows
The training was divided into phases. In the first, the creator (identified as Dave, under the username @biz_dave) established a feeding routine so that the crows would visit his garden daily. He used peanuts, chicken, pet food and other foods as incentives. Then he introduced small challenges: containers that the birds had to lift to access the food, plastic barriers and objects that required manipulation, according to La Razón.
The last phase consisted of replacing these objects with a red cap with metal rings, a detail that imitated the weight and grip of the previous elements. According to Dave himself, the crows ended up removing the object in less than two minutes, always in exchange for food. In his videos he stressed that the birds did not attack people, but only the object in question.
This has not happened yet, but with the experiments that some do with these birds, it would not be strange if it happened one day.
Intense debate on networks
This has generated an intense debate on networks. Many users celebrated the creativity and intelligence of crows, while others criticized the use of wildlife for political purposes and warned of possible risks to animal welfare or safety if the birds replicated the behavior in other contexts.
The discussion included legal and animal welfare issues: in the US many species of crows are protected and cannot be handled.
