What to Know
Thanks to President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, red caps are certainly not neutral. While there definitely are red hats that are not MAGA hats, many Trump critics would prefer to steer clear of them altogether because of what the accessory has come to symbolize. The association is so strong that a man on social media decided to train crows to attack red caps.
In a series on Threads, @biz_dave explained his process, which ended up being a months-long endeavor. On January 9, 2026, he shared a video of a crow pecking at a red cap to retrieve the food hidden underneath it. He captioned the video with, “Some folks want to befriend crows, or get them to bring trinkets. I have… other goals.”
The effort has gone viral.
Since sharing this on Threads, @biz_dave’s follower account has increased dramatically. He explained that he started by trying to “establish a consistent feeding space,” so he set out peanuts, chicken scraps, and kibble in the same spot every day. He then used a plastic Tupperware dish as a transparent barrier, blocking the crows from the food. When they got used to this, he progressed to using a red opaque cup.
“They took to striking the red cup pretty quickly, so after that skill was mastered, I started focusing on flipping things over in order to get their premium treats,” he wrote. So, he used both a transparent container and a red cup at the same time.
Next, he taught them how to lift an object to get their food, rather than just striking it. He did this by using a transparent butter dish with key rings glued to the top. And later, he hid the food under a red object that weighs about the same as a MAGA cap and is the same color: a red butter dish. “This thing weighs as much as a hat, and once they figured it out, they did it every day without fail,” he wrote.
Because they were comfortable with rings, he put rings around a red cap.
At first, though they didn’t seem to mind lifting things, the crows hesitated to interact with the red hat. But eventually, the crows realized the hat had food under it, and the man was able to remove the rings without any issues. “Once they got to this point, I was able to even get footage of me setting the target out and them hitting it within a two-minute window,” he explained.
View on Threads
The series is extremely popular, but reactions have been mixed. Many people were happy to see something on social media that seemed uplifting, hopeful, or at the very least, humorous during difficult times. “This is the post I needed after a heavily emotional day with this regime,” one person wrote in response. Someone else said, “This is one of the best uses of someone’s spare time that I’ve ever seen.” And several people even suggested that this crow training was heroic, with one of them writing, “Not all heroes wear capes.”
Others, however, were worried about how this training could end up impacting the innocent crows. “My only objection to this is the harm and disappointment that will come to the crows, when they discover there is nothing of substance under most red hats,” another person commented.
Several people have also worried that the crows would not be able to differentiate between MAGA caps and other red hats, which brought them to another point: Why did the MAGA movement have to ruin red hats for everyone else? “What if someone just has a red cap cause they like their red cap tho… I hate how maga has ruined red caps,” one person lamented.
