(This posting includes a handout LINK AT THE END OF THIS POST which you are welcome to use with your students.) *

The video shows a leopard chasing and then catching a gazelle. The leopard then starts to drag the body next to a small pond. Just as it starts to eat, it hears a man’s soft voice talking about a book he had just read. The leopard stops eating, looks to the area that the voice came from for a moment, then jumps up and runs away, leaving its dinner behind.

The man’s voice was a recording playing from a speaker set up near the pond. Researchers had put the device there as part of their study to learn how scary human sounds were to wild animals compared to other sounds. (See complete article below.)

For background information about these articles and for suggestions for how to use them with your students, see  • Introducing “Short, High-Interest Readings”  Also, I’ll be adding more of these articles in the right-hand column: ESL Reading> Short, High Interest Articles for Extensive Readings

Here is the eleventh article. You can download the article for your students by clicking on the link at the end. Also included are three optional exercises: True-False Questions; Paraphrasing Exercise; Reflection Exercise.

                      The Scariest Sound To Wild Animals: People Not Lions

The video shows a leopard chasing and then catching a gazelle. The leopard then starts to drag the body next to a small pond. Just as it starts to eat, it hears a man’s soft voice talking about a book he had just read. The leopard stops eating, looks to the area that the voice came from for a moment, then jumps up and runs away, leaving its dinner behind.

The man’s voice was a recording playing from a speaker set up near the pond. Researchers had put the device there as part of their study to learn how scary human sounds were to wild animals compared to other sounds.

They placed  recorders and speakers in trees near water holes where they knew wild animals would spend time during the dry season in Kruger National Park in South Africa.  The devices included motion detectors and would turn on a recording when an animal was nearby.

The recording sometimes was of songs from local birds, dogs barking, sounds of a gunshot, lions growling and humans talking calmly. The human voices came from news stories read by both men and women in four different languages.

The researchers needed to be very careful to make sure the volume for every sound was the same.  They did this because they wanted to know if the animals’ reactions were because of the animal or human making the sound, not because of the loudness.

Researchers analyzed 4,000 videos of 19 species, including giraffes, leopards, hyenas, zebras and impalas. They found that when they heard human voices, they ran away twice as often as when they heard the sound of a lion, dog or gun, and they ran away 40 percent faster.

Interestingly, when elephants heard human voices, like the other animals, they ran away. However, when they heard a lion growling, they ran toward the speakers and smashed them. A researcher explained the possible reason for this. When elephants hear lion sounds, they will gather close together to protect their babies. It appears that the elephants were more scared of the human sounds than the lion ones because they never attacked the speakers when it had human voices. It shows that elephants know that as a group, they can chase lions away, but they can’t do that against humans who have weapons like spears and guns.

Researchers are now hoping to use this information to try to save rhinoceroses. Rhinos are endangered because of poachers, who illegally kill them. In the study, rhinos ran away from human voices twice as fast as they did when they heard lion sounds. As a result, researchers are experimenting to see if they can use human voices to scar rhinos away from roads or fences where poachers are.

Here is the link to the article and exercises that you can use with your students: Human sounds scare ARTICLE_EXERCISE

David Kehe
Faculty Emeritus

*About the free-download materials. During my 40 years of teaching ESL, I have had many colleagues who were very generous with their time, advice and materials. These downloads are my way of paying it forward.