Did you know that babies are not afraid of snakes? Like, at all?! Australian ABC program Secret Science pitted a handful of toddlers against a couple of harmless quite large snakes, and what happened next might surprise you! The babies pinch the snakes and even bite them! Yep. The Babies. Are Biting. The Snakes.
And this lack of fear does not apply only to human babies. Oragnutan babies also don’t fear snakes! On sanctuaries for orphaned orangutans in Indonesia, the caretakers show a group of baby orangutans a plastic cobra and demonstrate that they are beating the cobra with a stick.
As the narrator of the video says, In primates, recognition of snakes is instinctive, but fear of snakes is learned.
On this particular video, the baby orangutans seem pretty scared to me when the snake was revealed, but perhaps this wasn’t their first time they’d been through the “snake fearing course”.