Crows are astonishingly intelligent creatures. Most crows have the intelligence of a seven-year-old child. This isn’t poetic exaggeration; it’s well-documented. They can recognize individual human faces, remember them for years, and communicate that information to other crows. They solve multi-step puzzles, use tools, plan for future events, and pass learned behaviors down through generations.
Their intelligence is something many of us admire, and increasingly, something people attempt to exploit for their own gain and spectacle.
Recently, a headline circulated online about a man training crows to snatch red hats off people’s heads. The story was framed as clever, funny, even triumphant. Depending on the audience, it was treated as political commentary, social justice, or a harmless prank.
But beneath the surface, it raises a deeper and more troubling question: What happens when we teach animals to act on our anger instead of our responsibility?
Not all red hats are bad. An example is a local or professional sports team. Not all people wearing them are threats, however ridiculous they may look wearing the MAGA hats. And not all consequences are reversible once they’re set loose. (This is important)
Crows do not understand political nuance. They do not grasp satire or intent. What they do understand is pattern and reward. Red equals target. Human equals object. Action equals food.
Once that association is learned, it doesn’t stay isolated. Studies have shown that crows not only remember “dangerous” humans but also actively warn others about them, and even pass this knowledge to their young, even if the warning is misplaced. A behavior taught for amusement can persist for years, spreading through local crow populations long after the original trainer has walked away.
That means the fallout doesn’t belong solely to the person who thought it was funny or felt that the act was warranted.
A child wearing a red baseball cap supporting a local sports team. An elderly person in a red winter hat. Someone entirely uninvolved suddenly startled, harassed, or injured not by an animal acting naturally, but by one acting on human-directed bias.
There is also a quieter harm here: the erosion of our relationship with wildlife.
Crows thrive alongside humans because of mutual tolerance. They are highly social animals with strong family bonds, capable of cooperation and long-term memory. When we teach them to associate people with hostility or theft, we damage that fragile coexistence. And when those behaviors become inconvenient or frightening, it is the birds, not the humans, who often pay the price through removal or extermination.
It’s easy to laugh when the target feels abstract. It’s harder to reckon with the moment when cleverness crosses into cruelty.
We live in a time where anger feels justified, where symbolic acts feel cathartic. But outsourcing that anger to animals, especially animals capable of memory, learning, and social transmission, does not absolve us of responsibility. It multiplies it.
Crows deserve better than to be turned into weapons. People deserve better than to be reduced to symbols. And intelligence, whether human or animal, should never be divorced from ethics.
Being witty is not the same as being wise.
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When Clever Becomes Cruel: The Ethics of Training Crows to Target “Red Hats”
Crows are astonishingly intelligent creatures. Most crows have the intelligence of a seven-year-old child. This isn’t poetic exaggeration; it’s well-documented. They can recognize individual human faces, remember them for years, and communicate that information to other crows. They solve multi-step puzzles, use tools, plan for future events, and pass learned behaviors down through generations.
Their intelligence is something many of us admire, and increasingly, something people attempt to exploit for their own gain and spectacle.
Recently, a headline circulated online about a man training crows to snatch red hats off people’s heads. The story was framed as clever, funny, even triumphant. Depending on the audience, it was treated as political commentary, social justice, or a harmless prank.
But beneath the surface, it raises a deeper and more troubling question: What happens when we teach animals to act on our anger instead of our responsibility?
Not all red hats are bad. An example is a local or professional sports team.
Not all people wearing them are threats, however ridiculous they may look wearing the MAGA hats.
And not all consequences are reversible once they’re set loose. (This is important)
Crows do not understand political nuance. They do not grasp satire or intent. What they do understand is pattern and reward. Red equals target. Human equals object. Action equals food.
Once that association is learned, it doesn’t stay isolated. Studies have shown that crows not only remember “dangerous” humans but also actively warn others about them, and even pass this knowledge to their young, even if the warning is misplaced. A behavior taught for amusement can persist for years, spreading through local crow populations long after the original trainer has walked away.
That means the fallout doesn’t belong solely to the person who thought it was funny or felt that the act was warranted.
A child wearing a red baseball cap supporting a local sports team.
An elderly person in a red winter hat.
Someone entirely uninvolved suddenly startled, harassed, or injured not by an animal acting naturally, but by one acting on human-directed bias.
There is also a quieter harm here: the erosion of our relationship with wildlife.
Crows thrive alongside humans because of mutual tolerance. They are highly social animals with strong family bonds, capable of cooperation and long-term memory. When we teach them to associate people with hostility or theft, we damage that fragile coexistence. And when those behaviors become inconvenient or frightening, it is the birds, not the humans, who often pay the price through removal or extermination.
American Cardinal Robert Prevost Becomes Pope Leo XIV
We trained them.
They get blamed.
It’s easy to laugh when the target feels abstract. It’s harder to reckon with the moment when cleverness crosses into cruelty.
We live in a time where anger feels justified, where symbolic acts feel cathartic. But outsourcing that anger to animals, especially animals capable of memory, learning, and social transmission, does not absolve us of responsibility. It multiplies it.
Crows deserve better than to be turned into weapons.
People deserve better than to be reduced to symbols.
And intelligence, whether human or animal, should never be divorced from ethics.
Being witty is not the same as being wise.