Animals

This prairie dog equipped with ‘advance auto-levelling’ is next level stuff

Poke Staff. Updated February 25th, 2021

This video of a prairie dog keeping its head still – very still – went viral because it’s such an amazing watch.

And when we stay still, we really do mean still.

And just three of the things people said about it after it was shared by commercialsmaybe on Reddit.

‘I like how he moves up in increments. Reminds me of some type of pallet jack or something.’ kozilla

‘Chickens do this as well. It’s weird.’ reallylovesguacamole

‘People do, too, but we have muscles attached directly to the eyeball to make it happen. Animals who can’t move their eyes as easily use other muscles to stabilize their view. It’s called the vestibulo-ocular reflex.’ Pvt_Lee_Fapping

And just in case you wanted some extra detail (of course you wanted some extra detail!)

‘They’re called saccades and you do it too! Only with your eyeballs rather than your whole head. If you look in a mirror and move your head around your eyeballs stay perfectly still, but if you try to move your eyes smoothly its completely impossible, they can only move in short, jerk-y saccades as you shift focus from one object to the next.

‘The only way to have smooth movement of your eyeballs is if your eye is actually following a moving object, you cant do it conciously.

‘For animals with less developed eyeball muscles the self-leveling and saccading is done with the neck muscles instead, which is why basically all birds (and prairie dogs apparantly) self level like this but also have such jerky head movements.’ flyonthwall

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This dog trying to be sneaky is very funny and absolutely adorable

Source @buitengebieden_ Reddit u/commercialsmaybe