Little Girl Hypnotizes Animals On Live TV

What do you get when you combine puppy, a bunny, a chicken, a frog, a lizard, and a 5-year-old girl who can hypnotize animals? If your answer is “More cute than the human heart can withstand,” you are not wrong. Seriously, this video is so adorable it needs to come with a warning label.

Snow White may have used her singing to attract all the creatures of the forest, but Han Jiaying uses her hands and voice to seemingly put them to sleep. The child, from Shenyang, Liaoning Province, in China, recently competed on the talent show Amazing Chinese by demonstrating her ability to hypnotize five animals in under five minutes. A clip from the show shows the little girl, who GB Times also identifies as “Ying Ying,” calmly picking up one animal at a time, speaking to it, turning it onto its back, and patting it gently. After rendering all five animals immobile, she gives a signal, and they all awaken, seemingly none the worse for wear.

According to GB Times, Jiaying isn’t actually performing hypnosis. Rather, she is putting the animals into a state of tonic immobility or “apparent death.” For many species, tonic immobility (also known as “playing dead”) is an instinctive defense mechanism. Humans can sometimes induce the state in animals by restraining them or putting them on their backs. So-called animal hypnosis is nothing new (Popular Science suggests that studies of the phenomenon were common in the 1970s and 80s), but it’s unusual for a 5-year-old to be able to do it. GB Times reports that the little girl first discovered her “talent” more than a year ago when she began petting a frog in her Kindergarten class and it became immobile. Zhou Yongmei, director of the Shenyang Youth Mental Health Centre, told GB Times, "Whether the child is self-taught or trained, she is definitely different from other kids. After all, not everyone can make an animal go into that state.”

Although the whole video is one continuous string of adorableness, it’s the bits with the polka-dot clad Han Jiaying and the fluffliest, snuggliest puppy of all time that will completely melt your brain. I mean, come on. How is this even real?

We are all this person:

Watch the whole thing:

Images: YouTube (4)