A video of a man sleeping in a blanket with three cheetahs is going falsely viral with the claim that it is from Pipaleshvar Mahadev Mandir in Rajasthan’s Sirohi. However, it is actually a video from South Africa and shows an experiment by a known animal advocate by the name of Dolph C Volker.
CLAIM
Translated roughly, the message with the video claims that this video is from Pipleshwar Mahadev Temple and every night, this family of cheetahs sleeps with the temple servant considering him their own.
We found that the video was viral with this claim on Twitter and Facebook.
WHAT WE FOUND
On breaking the video up into keyframes through Invid and running a reverse image search, we found a tweet by IFS Officer Parveen Kaswan which carried the same video. In his tweet, he attributed the video to Dolph C Volker.
On running a keyword search, we came across a YouTube video uploaded by Volker on 21 January 2019, which we found to be a longer version of the viral video.
According to the description of the video, this was an experiment Volker had conducted in South Africa, at ‘The Cheetah Experience’, a cheetah-breeding centre, where he got special permission to spend a few nights with three cheetahs to understand more about the animals.
We found that Volker shared the same video on Twitter as well while on Facebook, he goes by the profile name ‘The Cheetah Whisperer’. According to his bio on his YouTube channel, he is an animal advocate with a Zoology degree and is fascinated by animal behaviour and studies them. On this YouTube channel, we saw that he had 499k subscribers and a huge number of videos with cheetahs.
Therefore, this video is being circulated with an unrelated claim.
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