How fake animal rescue videos have become a new frontier for animal abuse
Mark Auliya has no problem with snakes attacking other animals. Carnivores need to eat, after all. But last month, staring at a YouTube video in his home office in Bonn, Germany, the reptile expert threw his glasses down in disgust. “This is something really nasty,” he said.
On Auliya’s screen, a Burmese python, a constrictor that normally kills birds and small mammals, was locked onto a gibbon. The panicked primate was fighting for its life as the snake, coiled around its torso, began squeezing. Soon, the gibbon stopped moving. A man in a blue soccer jersey and jeans appears. Hurriedly, he uncoils the python, freeing the gibbon, and carries the snake offscreen. The traumatized gibbon cowers, covering its head.
“It’s so obvious this is fake, but people believe it,” says Auliya, a herpetologist at the Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig. The video seemed to suggest that the rescuer had arrived just in time to save the gibbon. But pythons first bite prey animals to anchor their constriction—something that didn’t happen in the gibbon video, Auliya says. Pythons also are nocturnal hunters, yet this video and many like it were shot during the day.
To Auliya, the only things that appeared real were the mistreatment of the animals being forced into these situations and the stress it must have caused them.
Several years ago, animal welfare groups first started noticing that videos of fake animal rescues were proliferating on YouTube. They’re all variations on a theme: An eagle attacks a snake, a crocodile attacks a duck, snakes attack pet cats, dogs, lizards. In each case, the kills are thwarted by human saviors who conveniently come upon them or hear the animals’ cries in time to prevent carnage.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-fake-animal-rescue-videos-have-become-a-new-frontier-for-animal-abuse
= new reply since forum marked as read
used as an example of the horror of of the whole thing. I've not been able to get that visual out of my mind. 
I signed the petition but unsubscribed from that group. I don't want to open my email and see something like that again unprepared.