The Secret Life of Our Pets - Season 1

Owners everywhere have an instinctive urge to communicate with their beloved pets, but the holy grail is to truly understand what they are saying to us and discovering what they think and how they feel. 

Now, with the help of brand-new science, ES we discover how every animal has their own unique way of expressing themselves, and the incredible new technology that's helping us to understand them. From the dog communicating with his owner using a system of buttons, to the parrots fooling Alexa into adding their favourite treats to the weekly shop, the rats constantly chatting away just above our hearing range, the guinea pigs born communicating, the rabbit helping an autistic child and the sniffer dog communicating with his owner to help to save the last Northern white Rhino on earth. We explore the extraordinary science behind interspecies communication.

We get inside the minds of our pets to discover how our pets are using their intelligence to conquer the human world. Using skills developed in the wild we discover how budgies pick intelligence over looks and why parrots are so good at dancing, how rats can learn to drive cars, a rabbit can play basketball and tortoises can solve a maze. With the help of the latest science we reveal how our pets are smarter, funnier and more adaptable than we ever thought possible. And in a timely reassessment of how good our pets brainpower really is, this film demonstrates how the happier and more stimulated our pets are, the smarter they become.

We reveal how many of our pets have been hiding incredible athletic abilities evolved from their wild origins. Discover ultra-running rodents who love working out on their wheels and the incredible distances they cover each day, the secrets of our guinea pig's remarkable turn of speed, the dogs who can outrun the most dedicated human athlete, and the cats agile enough to pick their way through a minefield of dominos, not to mention ballistic reptilian tongues, the weight lifting hamsters that can carry a quarter of their body weight in their cheeks and the bunnies leaping the equivalent of a double decker bus. Along the way we meet the chilled-out Tokyo tortoise who will outlive his owner by half a century, the Californian cat who loves to surf, the NYC rats visiting friends via a six-storey high wire act, and the extraordinary high-speed flight abilities of parrots, budgies and cockatiels. By celebrating, nurturing and unleashing our pets' extraordinary athletic talents we can bring joy and fun into their lives, as well as our own and strengthen the bonds between us.

Our pets developed incredible super senses over thousands of years surviving in the wild, so how do they help them navigate the human world as our pampered pets?

From dogs with thermal sensing noses, cats with the ability to navigate using magnetic forces, birds flocking millimetres from one another and football playing goldfish, not only do they experience things in far greater detail, they also have extra sensory that we don't giving them a heightened impression of the world and allowing them to experience it in ways we can only imagine.

In this film we reveal the latest science which is helping us realise the true scale of our pets extraordinary heightened super senses and discover how they can help them and us understand the world differently.