Original subtitles

Bruno Valente and his border collie Kazuza

love to explore the mountains of the Lauterbrunnen Valley

in Switzerland.

Kazuza is seven years old.

I have him, uh, since he was, uh, six months.

I believe there is a special bond between, uh, humans and dogs.

And that's something I realized when I spent a lot of time with Kazuza.

He looks at me, uh, and you realize…

…what I feel, we don't need words.

But these two aren't here for the bracing walks.

This is where Bruno indulges in his favorite pastime.

Base jumping.

I start base jumping, uh, around six and a half, uh, years.

It gave me a life.

So, I don't consider it a sport, really.

I love that you are in the nature. It's therapy.

Every time I was about to jump, I was asking my friends

to take care of him.

And they were saying that once I jumped,

he… he was trying to go towards me.

And that's what led me to think

that he might wanted, uh, want to jump.

It's a action dog.

In households across the world,

pets are at the heart of family life.

They share our homes,

but how well do we really know them?

In this series we'll dig deep into our pets' inner lives

to discover the secrets they've kept hidden until now.

From spectacular feats of communication…

Alexa.

…to extreme athleticism.

Extraordinary intelligence…

…and incredible super senses.

We'll meet remarkable pets from across the globe…

Come.

…whose owners have harnessed their hidden skills

and shared them with the world…

…and use groundbreaking technology

to reveal how amazing their brains and bodies really are.

In Switzerland, base jumper Bruno made a bold decision

and constructed a harness for his border collie, Kazuza.

I think about every single detail

in order to reduce the risk as maximum as possible.

We put a harness on him.

I got to the ledge.

He was super relaxed, super quiet, looking down.

Okay, five seconds!

Yeah. Five seconds.

All the signs that he was, uh,

not stressing, not feeling scared.

Yeah.

Kazuza!

We jumped, and it was beautiful.

Having my dog, uh, flying with me, amazing.

Like humans, dogs have an innate sense of self-preservation,

but Kazuza's bond with Bruno means his emotional intelligence

overcomes his instincts,

to the extent that he's prepared to leap from a 2,000-foot cliff with him.

I feel very comfortable,

and Kazuza was feeling the same way,

maybe because he trusts me.

And he knew that, uh, if he was with me, uh,

then everything is good.

I have him as a very smart dog,

so he definitely would run away

from everything related with jumping or flying

if he would not like it,

that's 100% guaranteed.

Ai, ai, ai.

On the landing, he just starts to whip his tail,

and he's laughing.

He's super stoked.

Whoo!

I try to take the harness from him,

it's super hard.

He kind of wants to keep the harness

'cause then maybe there's a chance of going again.

This tremendous trust is only possible

because Kazuza is intelligent enough to read Bruno's body language.

Well, I think every dog, they have something special, but him, yeah, uh,

it's like, uh, he's like a person.

Some person's soul reincarnated on him.

Kazuza is like a son.

Modern family life is full of opportunities,

and our pets have learned to enjoy the ride.

And the more fun they have, the smarter they become.

This is Snowball, rescue parrot and Internet dance sensation.

His enthusiastic moves and remarkable sense of rhythm

have earned him nearly seven million views across social media.

But they also caught the attention of John Iverson

and fellow neuroscientists at the University of California.

We saw the video on YouTube, and our jaw just literally drop… dropped to the floor.

Snowball is a sulphur-crested cockatoo

living at a parrot sanctuary in Indiana.

As soon as John and his team saw him, they knew there was more to his behavior

than just a funny video.

We were speechless when we saw Snowball dancing.

What was amazing about it was Snowball was really listening to the music

and really feeling the beat.

Snowball was revealing astonishing intelligence,

and the neuroscientists contacted his owner Irena for more footage.

They worked out Snowball was entertaining his millions

of adoring fans around the world

by busting an incredible 14 unique dance moves.

What we noticed along the way was that as we continued on these studies,

that his repertoire of movements seemed to be getting larger.

This really seems almost like a kind of a creativity.

But it should be known that… that all of his moves,

uh, he invented those himself.

Irena made it clear that, uh, he wasn't copying her.

And if you see the headbangs, unless Irena is a total heavy metal fan,

that's definitely his own thing.

So what exactly is going on in Snowball's brain?

- You still wanna dance, huh? - Yeah.

Yeah.

Like other members of the parrot family,

his dancing skills are connected to his ability to mimic sounds and speech.

- It's not fair! - It's not fair!

It isn't.

There's no question that to be able to dance,

you need a strong connection between the part of your brain that hears

and the part of your brain that moves.

Speech and music are very similar,

both being a collection of tones and rhythms.

John's theory is that if you have an area of the brain that processes speech,

and it's linked to the area of the brain that makes your body move,

you can dance.

Snowball can dance by himself to music,

but he's much more likely to dance if he has a partner.

And it turns out Snowball isn't the only groover.

Parrots around the world are having a ball expressing themselves through dance.

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

To the best of our knowledge, some of these movements are in fact found

in the wild in courtship dances.

But it's not known if birds dance to music in the wild,

so one idea we have is to… to get a Humvee with a huge stereo,

drive out to the outback, and just play the music, and see what happens.

- Yeah. - Yeah.

The more we enrich our pet's world…

…the happier they become.

But that's not all.

Our pets' cognitive abilities can be boosted

to extraordinary levels with the right environment.

To prove it, scientists at the University of Richmond are gearing up

for a race like no other.

The drivers that have emerged from the rat pack

as the more competent drivers, are Sophia and Aletheia.

Sophia means wisdom, and Aletheia, truth.

So, with truth and wisdom at the wheel, who can lose?

And so that's what this race is all about.

They've been trained individually, and then we're putting them together.

Sophia is driving the red car and Aletheia, the yellow.

Sophia gets off to a flyer. Aletheia hesitates.

Could it have cost her?

The lead widens.

Sophia crosses the line to scoop first prize,

a treat tree laden with food.

I don't care what kind of mood you're in, when you see a rat driving a car,

it's almost like seeing a… a pig fly or something, people laugh.

Professor Kelly Lambert has studied rats for 35 years.

She's fascinated by their ability to adapt to new challenges.

Rats don't have a great reputation,

but I see rats through a different lens.

They're survivors, and they're very intelligent.

Six years ago, she was looking for a new way of testing them.

A colleague asked me about rats driving cars,

and I said, "No, why would I want to do that?"

But then, once you think about that, you can't not think about it.

So, before I knew it, we were having coffee,

thinking about what the car would look like,

and how would you get it to activate the car, and thinking about

the behavior of the animals.

Kelly also wanted to see if the rats' environment

affected their ability to learn.

Most rats in laboratories are housed in various standard cages.

They have all the food, everything they need to live,

but it's not engaging or interesting. Brains need engagement.

So we've done a lot with these enriched environments,

larger environments with more social interactions

and objects to interact with.

It's almost like a rat Disneyland.

And being in that enriched environment seems to prepare the animals

to learn new skills, if you will, or new tasks.

Of the six in the rat palace,

the team felt that Sophia and Aletheia showed the most potential.

Not least because they were both rather partial to a Froot Loop.

Hey.

Erin Burns is chief treat distributor.

We start by putting the Froot Loops through the top of the cage,

and then slowly we'll introduce Froot Loops in the car environment

and we'll let them kinda eat the Froot Loops, explore the car.

Then we'll put the Froot Loops in the car, try to make that

a positive experience for them.

It culminates with the rats learning how to drive.

They need to stand close to the lever to get the reward,

and then they need to touch the lever to get the reward. So we're shaping.

And then they have to press the lever, and keep it down to drive the car,

and to keep driving to get to the Froot Loop.

It took six weeks for Aletheia and Sophia to learn to go forward.

But that was only the start,

and they soon progressed to more advanced driving.

Once rats learn the concept of driving forward,

we would put that treat tree where they could not get it driving forward,

they had to turn.

Soon, there was simply no stopping them.

They're learning the concept of direction and steering,

uh, kind of like a skill.

So it kind of blew my mind. And every time I look at them, I still go, "Wow."

Seems to be positive experience for the animals that allows us

to learn more about how the brain learns

and adapts to these very complex challenges.

Kelly's work with racing rats is proving without question

that if you give your pet a happy, stimulating life,

you'll see a difference in its behavior.

So it's important to challenge, uh, your pets,

and have different things that they can play

and to be active, we need to be active.

And the rats in the enriched environment, they're running around more and climbing,

and that's very good for their brains to be physically active.

Thankfully, rats driving cars haven't hit our highways just yet.

But in suburban Los Angeles,

one pet lives in an enriched environment that's taking him to new heights.

This is Shai Lighter,

and like many doting pet owners,

he relishes the prospect of seeing his companion at the end of a working day.

I love the feeling, when I'm going back home,

and somebody is waiting for me.

Bini, come. Come. Come.

It's great that someone is coming to greet me.

And bunnies can get affectionate.

It comes and licks me.

They're lovable, they're… they're like dogs.

Bini is a Holland Lop Rabbit who's been in Shai's care for nine years.

As a baby, Bini was always, erm, very curious,

and he always liked to explore the apartment.

I used to look in his eyes, and he was looking at me,

like trying to understand what I'm telling him.

And this is when I realized that he's more than just a bunny.

Bini, come.

Shai decided to open up his hutch, and give Bini

the run of the apartment.

If a rabbit is locked in a cage or a hutch,

they wouldn't interact with their owner.

You won't get the same connection with them,

and you can't do anything with them.

Uh, and then people are surprised, "Oh, my rabbit is not smart as yours."

Of course not. You need to… to be with them.

Jump! Yay! Another jump! Another jump!

Sure enough, it wasn't long before Shai saw a whole new side

to his pet.

One day, I caught Bini playing with a ball in a box,

and I decided that this can be like a basketball game.

So I changed the box with a basketball hoop,

and I gave him a basketball ball, and…

Hello.

And showed him some tricks and then I gave him food.

And he knew that this is the game.

He learned the tricks very well,

and he likes the game because he developed the game for himself.

And we play this game every day before we go to sleep.

Bini eventually bounced into the Guinness Book of World Records

for the most slam dunks ever scored by a rabbit in a minute:

seven.

Not only the basketball.

One day, I caught him playing with markers on the floor,

and I got very mad because the floor was very messy.

Then I decided, "You know what? It could be like the basketball."

"If he likes to play with something, let him play."

Come, Bini.

So, I changed the markers with paintbrushes,

and I bought some canvases.

I showed him what to do, I gave him the paintbrush.

And he just, like, he started to paint.

Here you go.

I'm surprised, like, I have, like, a Picasso rabbit at home.

I think rabbits have great memory.

Bini learns so many tricks, and he never forgets them.

Sometimes it's kind of like reading minds,

I just show him the trick, then he started to do it.

It's always shocking.

Bini, come.

With patience, love, and plenty of treats,

Shai has shown how remarkable a relaxed rabbit can be.

I believe that all rabbits can learn tricks.

Like, just give them food and the attention they need and love,

and they need to know that they are secure. Um.

And that's how they know that they can trust you.

Thanks to social media, the joy of living with our pets

can be shared with the world.

This disappearing act is a hit.

It may confuse the dogs,

but it shows they know when we're messing with their minds.

The more we play, the more pets are revealing

their astonishing social intelligence.

Jack and Nikki are a pair of African grey parrots

who are helping scientists with their research

at the Loro Parque Foundation in Tenerife.

They are actually siblings, and they have a very close bond

with each other.

This brother-and-sister bond is changing the way

we think about parrot behavior.

They and 44 other parrots belong

to the Max Planck Comparative Cognition team

that Anastasia Krasheninnikova has been working with for over ten years.

Parrots are quite special among all the birds.

Uh, parrots have very large brains.

What I've learned is that it doesn't actually matter

how do we think that the parrot will behave.

We can be 100% sure that, um, it will surprise us.

The research team came up with an experiment

to test the sociability of African greys…

with mind-blowing results.

First of all, they taught Nikki and Jack a simple rule.

We, um, trained the parrots to use, um, tokens,

metal washers, as a kind of currency

that they can use, um, like we use money to buy food.

They separated the siblings using a screen with a hole in it.

At first, both Nikki and Jack are able to exchange the tokens for food.

But then, Anastasia seals Nikki's window.

Now, Nikki has the tokens, but no means of getting the food.

What happens next is astonishing.

Nikki starts to pass the tokens to Jack

so that he can get the food.

They realize that the partner is in need, and they try to help.

We were very impressed because this is the first time for birds, um,

that we could show that they spontaneously

and voluntarily help each other.

And this kind of kindness is actually very rare in animal kingdom.

When Anastasia blocks Jack's window,

the tables are turned,

and this time Nikki benefits.

Using a number of parrots, Anastasia discovered

that the closer the bond, the more tokens they passed each other.

What we see here is something like,

"You scratch my back, I will scratch yours."

So the more tokens, um, one bird gives to… to its partner,

the more tokens it will get back.

This teamwork requires both intelligence and empathy.

It comes from an understanding of how to help a friend.

Parrots are very, um, social animals,

and their groups have a very complex social structure.

And this kindness can be helpful

to maintain, um, some particular relationships.

I think it highlights just how clever they are

and that we should be very respectful, um,

towards parrots, but also other animals.

Looking out for each other is an integral part of our relationship

with our pets.

And sometimes, the way this manifests itself

surprises everyone.

Nine-year-old lurcher Bill has a favorite spot in his garden.

It's where his sister Ruby is buried.

She's buried in the garden under a rose bush.

And he used to lay there all the time.

I always find him there in the summer.

Does he know she's there, having been buried, you know?

I'd like to think he does.

I think he does. I like to think he knows.

- I'd like to think he knows. - Yeah.

Russell and Michelle doted on Bill and Ruby since they were pups.

Good girl, Rubs. Good girl. Come on.

For six years, Bill and Ruby were inseparable, until tragedy struck.

She had, um, kidney failure, and we had to say goodbye.

- Never been apart. - Very close.

Very, very close, yeah.

All of a sudden, his sister's disappeared and not there.

And then, when she was gone, he was, like, just…

- Just quiet. - …quiet.

For a bit. Just getting used to being one dog.

Didn't want to let go of us.

- Wants to be around us. - More clingy.

Suppose it must have been… He must have felt lonely himself.

A recent study of dogs that lost a companion

revealed that many of them showed altered behavior,

which can be a sign of depression,

with 80% of them becoming more affectionate to their owners.

This is exactly what Russell and Michelle noticed in Bill.

He started to follow them everywhere.

Then, when Michelle hurt her back,

it became clear that Bill had a caring personality.

I was in a lot of pain.

My back was really, really painful, and I couldn't really move.

And he was just sort of there, sat there with me, guarding me, almost.

Because I was crying in pain. Put his head on me.

A reassurance or some… Yeah, that's what he's doing. Big time.

But the couple didn't realize just how empathetic Bill was

until Russell broke his ankle window cleaning.

When I was getting used to my crutches and the plaster,

I didn't take much notice of Bill.

Not that I didn't want to, I just concentrated on getting around.

So I didn't notice nothing. Until Michelle had said something.

Poor Bill appeared to have hurt his leg too.

Or had he?

When I saw the video, I couldn't really believe it.

If you look, it's a very over-exaggerated limp.

But strangely, it seemed Bill was able to turn his limp on and off.

If he was out in the garden with me or I took him for a walk,

he seemed to be fine. Didn't seem to have any problems at all.

For two days, Bill continued to behave like this with Russell

and like this with Michelle.

Concerned, the couple took him to the vet.

Didn't limp walking in, and I said to Michelle,

"They're not gonna find nothing now 'cause he's not limpin'."

They done several things, tests and whatever they did.

- And they couldn't find a thing. - No.

Come on. Go on. Come here. Wait.

Scientists have proved that dogs have incredible empathy

for their owners.

But Bill's empathy was on a new level.

He appeared to be pretending to suffer

to make Russell feel loved.

I think that's clever.

He's decided that he wants to limp as well by just looking at me,

and thinking, "Oh, perhaps I should be doing the same."

Who's my good boy?

Come on, then. Go on.

I do think dogs are amazing.

I think they make a home a home.

Imitation may be the best form of flattery,

but it's also a sure sign of brain power.

Helping our pets crack the trickiest tasks.

This is Gambit, a bearded dragon.

A gate currently separates him from his favorite food, mealworms.

He doesn't know it yet, but the only way to get at them

is to slide the door to the right.

Poor Gambit. So near, but so far.

Until recently, lizard experts would have doubted his ability to solve the problem.

But scientists have devised an experiment

to see if bearded dragons can learn problem-solving by watching each other.

They've trained a bearded dragon to slide the gate open and filmed it.

Gambit watches the "how to" movie.

What will he do now?

Astonishing.

Gambit has made the connection between what he's seen on a screen

and his own real-life problem and solved it.

This form of social learning is a sure sign of intelligence.

Our pets' intelligence connects us to them.

But it's also what they most value in each other.

Meet budgies Debbie and Bubba.

There's no doubt that his gorgeous plumage makes Bubba a very pretty boy.

Debbie seems to agree.

But here comes Albert who clearly has his eye on Debbie.

Bubba's sitting pretty for now.

But look out, Bubba, Albert has a trick up his sleeve.

A ground-breaking study has revealed

that it's not just looks that females go for.

Albert has been trained to get food by solving a puzzle.

Nice work, and it's not gone unnoticed.

Bubba's keen to prove he's just as smart.

But without training, there's no chance.

It's got Debbie thinking.

In the original study, only half the male budgies

were trained to solve a puzzle.

The female budgies overwhelmingly preferred the birds with brains.

A reflection, perhaps, of their wild origins

where finding food is crucial.

Sorry, Bubba, this time it's the geek with the beak that wins the girl.

We've seen how pets have used their intelligence

to master our modern world, but that's not all.

It's their intelligence that also allows them to conquer our hearts.

Okay.

Next time…

…communication,

the Holy Grail for pets everywhere.

- What are you doing? - What are you doing?

- Love you. - Love you too.

How technology is giving pets a voice.

It was a light bulb moment for both of us.

And how the more we understand them, the more

they're transforming our lives.

Nothing could happen to me because he will protect me.

It blows my mind how Ted can make people so happy.

Teddy.

I love him.