
Man's Best Friend
Clip: Season 25 Episode 1 | 4m 4sVideo has Closed Captions
A variety of animals are interviewed about their experiences with humans! (Jaimi Qiu/CalArts)
A variety of animals are interviewed about their experiences with humans! (Jaimi Qiu/CalArts)
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Fine Cut is a local public television program presented by PBS SoCal

Man's Best Friend
Clip: Season 25 Episode 1 | 4m 4sVideo has Closed Captions
A variety of animals are interviewed about their experiences with humans! (Jaimi Qiu/CalArts)
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Awesome.
Okay, so my pet's name is Skooda.
Whenever you pet her, she puts her arm on your arm like she's trying to pet you in return.
We don't know where she learned that, but she always does that, and she's very, very cute.
My sister taught him how to do high-fives.
Whenever he wants food, he would come and high-five and put his little paw on the leg and stare at you very intensely.
Oh yes, he likes to go outside.
At first, I brought him outside because I thought, "Oh, how cool would it be to walk him."
He was a little bit scared at first, but then he got really, really interested to a point where it's really, really tiring because he want to go outside 24/7.
I remember the first time we put them outside, and the grass blades were like as big as them.
They were just falling over, and it was so sweet.
[chuckles] Every experience that she had, she's having for the first time.
You'd see her watching a butterfly, and it was her first time ever seeing a butterfly.
She was just really excited about being alive.
They have a lot of really funny behaviors.
Everyone has their own little thing.
Like Eddie, he bobs his head a lot, and it's for no reason.
He's always just bobbing his little head, and I also have picked up.
[chuckles] I've picked up his mannerisms.
Sometimes, I bob my head for no reason, and if you try it, it feels nice.
They each have different personalities.
Sometimes, it'll swim up to you and say hi to you, others will hide from you.
It's very interesting, and sometimes I think that they're smarter than we give them credit for.
He has such a big personality.
It's big, and we're like, "He's so weird."
He's really weird.
Yes.
He tries his- [laughter] He's watching us in the back to make sure we're saying the right things.
She speaks to us.
I know she knows a lot of words.
True.
When she looks at you and we're talking to her, she's so close to understanding.
Yes.
She's seconds away from speaking back to me.
I can tell there's a human trapped in there.
Because I do feel like they have so much more, and they're so much smarter than we give them credit to.
They do, and how they communicate, because even if they don't actually have a voice, they're so vocal in their body language.
A lot of us speak the same language.
I never really used to think about that until working with them.
Different gestures and nonverbal communication can just be interpreted so many different ways.
Just like us, we're really tiny compared to all these wild animals, lions, bears, chimpanzees.
We're really weak compared to them, but we work each other.
We gather as a group of hundreds of thousands.
We form a city, an empire.
That's how we thrive.
They're just like us.
Even though each one of them are really small, they gather together, they're massive, and they're incompatible.
I think humankind is very intimately entwined with horse-kind.
[chuckles] I do think that.
He is my son, my grandfather, my brother, my father.
He's everything.
It's like having a baby and having something to draw.
It's like, if I don't know what to draw, I can just draw [?]
which is I did for my films.
It's like having a roommate, like this thing is just there.
It's really nice.
It's comforting.
It's unconditional love, do you know what I mean?
No matter what's going on in your life, your pet loves you anyway.
They don't judge you, they don't see your failures.
They just think you're terrific, and they're there for you.
They're great.
Let's see, is there anything else?
You and me talk very similarly.
Can I stop the recording?
Absolutely.
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