Incorrect Animal Noise

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• In the "Green Sense" commercial, a starling's call is overdubbed with the far cuter, far less cacophonic robin's song.
• In one Axe hair gel commercial, a man (using a different hair gel) impales fish on his hair while cliff diving and is attacked by a seagull screeching like a hawk.
• "An Unlikely Friendship", a Prime Video ad where a zookeeper adopts a spotted hyena, shows the hyena and its ex-clanmates growling like dogs. A real hyena would likely be doing its famous "laugh" in such a situation, but because the premise of the commercial is that the hyena laughs when watching funny shows and movies with its new owner, they couldn't use that sound for that purpose. The laughing sounds they do use aren't always accurate to how a hyena sounds, either.

• Azur Lane The Animation: Enterprise's bald eagle screams like a red-tailed hawk.
• One Piece: The reindeer herd that Chopper fights with during his flashback bellow like elk- for dramatic reasons, as real life caribou only really grunt.

• Ask Not the Sparrow: Discussed and defied in Love Bites. Rainbow asked Fluttershy to make a "majestic eagle call" as an alarm, but Rarity tells her that she's thinking of a hawk's call. Immediately afterwards, Fluttershy makes a "squeaking sound like a very excited and feminine turkey", which is what bald eagles actually sound like.

• An American Tail: The Cossack cats snarl and growl like leopards. Justified because they are seen from the perspective of mice, to whom a domestic cat is as dangerous as a big cat would be to a human. Other felines in the movie, however, are capable of speech.
• Batman & Mr. Freeze: SubZero: For whatever reason, Mr. Freeze's two polar bears constantly let out big cat roars and growls and seldomly utter actual bear vocalizations.
• Dumbo: A striped hyena laughs and a gorilla produces a roar similar to Tarzan's yell. Although the striped hyena is usually silent, they are technically capable of laughing, but unlike the loud giggles of the spotted hyena, the striped hyena's laugh sounds more like a high pitch chatter.
• Felix the Cat Saves Christmas: Rock Bottom somehow gets attacked by a group of squirrels that oddly make dolphin sounds.
• Finding Nemo has a roaring barracuda and a screeching anglerfish. Given their respective scenes are particularly heavy on Nightmare Fuel, this is most likely a case of Rule of Scary. The giant squid from Finding Dory also utters a few guttural growls and snarls.
• Happy Feet: Whenever Mumble sings terribly, a call of a bull elk (Cervus canadensis) is used.
• Flow (2024): Animal noises were recorded from real animals. However, capybaras wouldn't produce enough sounds, and young camels were recorded instead.
• Kubo and the Two Strings: The mythical Golden Herons are voiced using recordings of common loons.
• Kung Fu Panda 1: Tai Lung (a snow leopard) frequently uses tiger and leopard vocalizations and snarls. Actual snow leopard snarls sound notably different - they're more 'asthmatic' in tonal quality (you can actually hear them in a handful of scenes). Also, snow leopards are physically incapable of roaring, as they make squeaky yowling noises instead.
• The Lion King:
  • The Lion King (1994): Hyenas often make dog noises, with the exception of the hooting laughter of the spotted hyena. Despite their physical resemblance and similar behavior to canines, hyenas belong to a family of their own, and their closest relatives are civets and genets. Ironically, as they belong to the Feliformia suborder, this also makes Hyenas related to cats!
  • The Lion King II: Simba's Pride: Lions are now capable of purring. Lions can't purr.
• The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea: A barracuda seen briefly during Tip and Dash's song roars like a grizzly bear.
• The Magic Voyage features a shark who roars like a cougar.
• Make Mine Music: The eponymous wolf from the Peter and the Wolf short can roar like a lion, with his first scene having him utter a Mighty Roar at the audience. An obvious example of Rule of Scary, since it's pretty common knowledge that canines can't roar.
• The Rugrats Movie features a wolf whose growls sound more like some sort of big cat than a wolf.
• Tarzan (1999):
  • The gorillas all make chimpanzee sounds. In reality, gorillas grunt, scream, belch and (oddly enough) purr, but they don't 'pant-hoot' like chimps. Granted, Kerchak does make gravely grunts, snorts and roars, which are at least semi-realistic.
  • While real leopard vocalizations are used, Sabor also frequently utters cougar yells, even though leopards are roaring cats and don't make such vocalizations. Tiger roars are also used, but at least they are pretty close to how a leopard sounds.

General examples

• All fictional lizards (the cute ones, at least) seem to make the same weird nasal growling noise (which comes from, of all things, a baby jaguar).
• African elephants frequently use recordings of their Asian counterparts in film. This is likely due to the fact that fewer African elephant recordings exist in public domain sound effects libraries.
• Some documentaries play cougar sounds over footage of cheetahs, and at least one instance used a roar for them. Cheetahs are in the Felinae subfamily, and are in fact the second largest small cat after the cougar; as such, they make sounds such as chirps, barks, purrs and even meows, but they don't make cougar screams and certainly not roars like big cats.

Specific films

• Apocalypto, by Mel Gibson: At the beginning of the film a tapir is shown except it squeals like a pig. In reality, tapirs make chuffing noises or high-pitched mouse-like squeaks instead of squealing like that.
• A roaring giant squid in the adaptation of Peter Benchley's The Beast. The squid actually made a distorted shriek/screech, like a giant mechanical eagle (or red-tailed hawk).
• The ferrets in The Beastmaster make some very un-ferret like sounds. Real ferrets make very little sound most of the time, but often hiss, grunt, and make a sort of chortling sound when playing.
• Beauty and the Beast (2017): When they're not howling, the wolves very noticeably growl like lions.
• Conan the Barbarian (1982): The vulture that tries to eat Conan when he's nailed to the Tree of Woe sounds like some type of seagull, which is doubly wrong because Conan is biting its neck and it shouldn't be able to vocalize at all.
• Congo: The hippopotamus that attacks the protagonists while they’re rafting over a lake at nighttime makes elephant roars, mostly due to Rule of Scary, as the grunting noises made by actual hippos aren’t the most threatening sounds.
• The Graduate: The first shot during the zoo scene shows spider monkeys, but they emit the screams of chimpanzees.
• Hot Fuzz: The swan honks like a goose. The particular species of swan seen here is a Mute swan. Contrary to its name, it is not actually mute, and makes a wide variety of rumbling, snorting and hoarse whistling noises, as well as its famous snake-like hiss to deter predators or intruders, but this species cannot honk like a goose.
• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: All the big cats except Aslan make cougar sounds, and the badgers make guinea pig noises. Not even Aslan can escape being plagued by leopard and tiger sounds, in spite of having authentic lion growls and snarls on occasion.
• Jaws 1: A soft echoing roar is heard when Bruce's decapitated body sinks into the abyss at the end of Jaws (though that's merely symbolic, and was the same roar from Spielberg's earlier film Duel).
• Jaws 3-D has a growling sound audible whenever the shark opens its mouth (it was a very deep watery sound that you might miss most of the time).
• Jaws: The Revenge takes this trope to its illogical conclusion with its infamous roaring shark, despite sharks not even having any way of producing sounds. It certainly doesn't help that the roar sounds suspiciously like Jerry's bellowing from several Tom and Jerry shorts, making the roaring sound effects even more Narmy to those familiar with the cartoon.
• Kindergarten Cop: Kimble's ferret makes lots of squeaking, chittering noises that ferrets don't really produce.
• Nim's Island: The trailer features an impossibly talkative bearded dragon. They only hiss — and they'll do that only if you try to give them a bath.
• Nope: The screams the horses make when they get attacked by the UFO are actually that of distressed squealing pigs. This error may have come from the fact that the sound library the sound effect came from labeled it as a horse.
• Prey (2022): The mountain lion makes deep growls like an African lion rather than the much higher-pitched growls and shrieks that mountain lions actually make.
• Rise of the Planet of the Apes: Caesar the chimpanzee is heard roaring like a lion in a trailer. Did they give him that ability as a test run at the lab, before giving him a human-level intellect?
• Shark Attack 3: Megalodon: The eponymous giant shark makes stock monster roars, typically played over obviously edited Stock Footage.
• Sharknado 2: The Second One features roaring sharks once again, likely as a spoof of Jaws: The Revenge, among other killer shark movies in general.
• Them!: The giant mutant ants are quite noisy for creatures without vocal cords. The sounds are actually taken from two recordings of bird-voiced tree frogs (alongside birds in the background) and gray tree frogs respectively.

• Teddy Robinson: This trope is mentioned in one of the books. The titular teddy bear meets a cow, who goes "mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm". When Teddy Robinson asks why she doesn't go "moo", the cow replies that only storybook cows go "moo".

• Arrested Development: It's a Running Gag that everyone in the Bluth family makes an entirely different, completely inaccurate, chicken noise when they're trying to mock someone.
  Michael: Has no one in this family ever seen a chicken?
• The Colbert Report has an opening sequence has a red, white, and blue bald eagle making a red-tailed hawk's cry. The show being what it is, it's either intentional or would be if they knew.
• Flipper: Flipper's famous chatter is a sped-up kookaburra.
• Monk: One episode has the murder suspect of the week be a chimpanzee who was dubbed over with the more commonly recognized spider monkey noises. Chimps don't make the light chattering of smaller primates.
• MythBusters actually found an aversion: movie rattlesnakes and real rattlesnakes sound almost exactly alike. It would still be possible to use this trope (the Busters' own test and the stock recording were both Western Diamondbacks, the largest species and therefore the loudest rattlers; pinging the sound to something tiny or something that's not a rattlesnake at all would do it) but in an episode where many sounds were more wrong than this, it was nice to know that the sound of something that might kill you is accurately presented.
• Skippy the Bush Kangaroo: Skippy's trademark 'tchk tchk tchk' noise was entirely fictional. Kangaroos make no such sounds.

• Elton John: "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" mentions a howling owl. Although owls have been known to hoot, screech, cry, whistle and bark, they do not howl.

• Long-running soap opera The Archers frequently got caught out this way. It took the BBC a long time to realise that in a drama about farmers, they better had get the sound effects absolutely right. Merely ordering up "a sheep" or "a cow" from the BBC sound effects department wasn't going to cut it, not with a professionally aware audience. Farmers and shepherds would write in and complain — pointing out that if Dan Archer was out in the fields in February lambing a ewe, why then was the sheep he was tending to not making the distinctive noises of a ewe in labour? And for a supposedly newborn lamb, why was its bleating sounding like an eight-month old lamb in the fields? Oh, and that wasn't a cow Walter Gabriel was tending, you do realise you were playing a recording of a bull in heat just about to service a heifer? And them chickens what Clarrie Grundy was feeding, they weren't Rhode Island Reds at all, they was Belgian Red Wattles, completely distinctive clucks. The BBC gave in, and sent people out to farms with tape recorders to talk to the professionals and to get some really accurate animal sounds.

• Bloody Roar: The series is guilty as charged with most of the characters' animal forms, though the most glaring example would be Yugo, the roaring wolf.
• Broforce has a title screen where a bald eagle makes the sound of a red-tailed hawk.
• Build-A-Bear Workshop: A Friend Fur All Seasons: You can choose one of nine animal noises (includes monkey, cat, dog, frog, and cow) that may not fit the animal your furry friend is at all. For a bear, rabbit, or turtle, any of the 9 noises would be wrong, and there aren't any frog or cow options for physical bodies anyway.
• Club Penguin: The deer Puffles sound like elks (especially bull elks) rather than actual deer. Same applies to the rabbit Puffles who sound like guinea pigs.
• Deadly Premonition: Early on, a cutscene shows squirrels that sound like chimpanzees.
• Digital Devil Saga: The Demon Nue, which is a chimera hybrid of a monkey and tiger, infamously makes stock seagull sounds. This may a case of Shown Their Work in a different sense, however: the mythical nue was said to have a bird's voice, albeit written in some texts as "hyoo hyoo" like a thrush.
• Far Cry:
  • Far Cry 3: The cassowaries that appear in this game sound absolutely nothing like cassowaries. Real cassowaries make low, sub-bass booming sounds, almost ape-like hoots, and elephant-like grunts.
  • Both leopards and jaguars in Far Cry 5, Far Cry 6, and Far Cry Primal sound like cougars, despite being in the genus Panthera like lions and tigers and thus being roaring cats. Clouded leopards and snow leopards likewise utter these same vocalizations despite being more closely related to big cats than small ones; snow leopards in particular are also part of the Panthera genus, though as noted in the Kung Fu Panda example above, they can't roar at all because they don't have voiceboxes.
• Fate/Grand Order: This is Played for Laughs by Tamamo Cat, who, despite her name, emits barking sounds like a dog in-between mangled Ice-Cream Koan and Pun-filled speech. Then again, her legend thinks she's a fox when she's actually a jackal, and she's a Ninja Pirate Robot Zombie variation of the more serious Tamamo-no-Mae in Fate/EXTRA.
• Final Fantasy IX: During the dramatic opening, there's a close-up of a pigeon crying like a red-tailed hawk.
• Fly Like a Bird: The barn owl (owls in general are famous for being silent fliers) makes sound as its wings flap.
• Impressive Title has a giant manta ray boss known as the Monster Ray, which occasionally emits a loud cacophonous sound that many players have likened to a cow's "moo" ^note it's actually a human voice slowed down despite the fact that rays don't have vocal cords.
• Kirby and the Forgotten Land: Fleurina, a big Funny Animal swan-like creature, screeches like a red-tailed hawk.
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: Wolf Link gives coyote howls instead of wolf howls. This is probably because a coyote's howl sounds more musical for the Ocarina of Time-style howling melody sections.
• Ori and the Blind Forest: The Big Bad Ominous Owl Kuro vocalizes with the aforementioned red-tailed hawk call. In the sequel, the Sand Worm in Windtorn Ruins has a stock tiger roar, as does Howl the dire wolf (who never actually howls) at the beginning of the game.
• Super Mario 64: Klepto the Condor's cry is actually the call of a goose.
• Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? (1997): Averting this trope is discussed. The player can give Anne Tikwitee a bird whistle that corresponds to a bald eagle. What plays isn't the (incorrect) high pitched screech many people expect — it's actually the (correct) eagle chirp. Anne then says "Whoa! For a big bird that's one small call!"
• Wingspan (2019): Discussed in the app. The bald eagle's cry is the correct sound for it, while the red-tailed hawk trivia points out how its cry is often used in place of the bald eagle's in movies.
• Yakuza 2: The tigers Kiryu faces in a boss battle are bizarrely given leopard and lion recordings as sound effects. This is all but completely averted in the remake; save for one lion roar, all their sound effects are tiger recordings.

• The barking cat video: The person filming sneaks up on a cat mimicking a dog's barking through an open window. A light switches on, the cat turns to face the camera, and, realising he's been spotted, quickly switches back to meowing normally.

• The hololive VTuber Raora Panthera is a Cat Girl themed after a leopard, rather than the usual housecat. In a pre-debut clip on Twitter, she plays a soundbite to make it seem like she's actually roaring; said soundbite is a tiger's roar rather than a leopard's, but at least it's not the cougar scream often used for the latter in fiction. In her debut stream, she also invokes this for laughs by making a domestic cat's purring (which leopards can't do), before realizing her goof and "correcting" herself by playing the tiger roar soundbite again.

• Batman: The Animated Series: "On Leather Wings": An in-universe example. Batman (as Bruce Wayne) brings a recording of bat-like sounds to Dr. March, an expert in bats, and claims that the sounds are coming from his chimney. Dr. March later calls and says that the sounds are from brown bats and starlings, probably fighting over a nest. Batman runs the combination through his computer, which states the sounds do not match either species and proving that Dr. March is lying about something.
• Classic Disney Shorts: Louie the Mountain Lion is a recurring Animal Nemesis for Donald Duck and Goofy, and also clashes with Goofy in Mickey Mouse Works. In all of his appearances, he's shown roaring like an actual lion, but despite the "mountain lion" moniker, cougars can't actually roar. They're the largest member of the Felinae subfamily — or, to put it a bit more fancifully, the 'biggest small cat' — and are more closely related to housecats than to roaring cats such as lions and tigers. Particularly noticeable, since the distinct yowls of cougars are themselves stock vocalizations for most wild felines in fiction that are smaller than tigers and lions, including the other two roaring cats, leopards and jaguars.
• DuckTales (2017): Some of the non-anthropomorphic animals in the show make sounds inaccurate for their species. Matilda McDuck's emu makes goose-like honks rather than the characteristic drumming sounds real emus make, and Santa's reindeer make horse-like neighs and snorts opposed to accurate reindeer sounds.
• Garfield and Friends: "Identity Crisis" has Garfield invoking this trope to get rid of Ralph the dogcatcher; Garfield barks like a dog despite being a cat, and teaches Floyd the Mouse to meow, while the bulldog shows Floyd his mouse imitation. At the end of the episode, when Garfield, Floyd, and the bulldog perform their act, a pigeon moos.
• Jem: "Britrock" features a fox that makes dog noises.
• Jonny Quest: One episode has a toucan that mimics human speech like a parrot, which toucans can't do in real life.
• Journey To The Center Of The Earth: One episode features a giant caterpillar that, for some reason, sounds exactly like a cat.
• The Lion Guard:
  • In one of the most jarring departures from the films, zebras make horse noises.
  • As usual, hyenas still yelp like dogs.
• ''Littlest Pet Shop (2012)":
  • In "Mean Isn't Your Color", when Penny Ling roars after Minka Mark said "Because it is the polite thing to do!", her roar sounded like the Disney bear growl.
  • and in "Super Sunil" for when Sunil asked Penny Ling to scare him, and after some hesitation, when she roars at him, her roar sounded a dinosaur.
• Looney Tunes: In "Lumber Jack-Rabbit", a moose whinnies like a horse upon hearing Paul Bunyan's dog blow a moose call, then whimpers like a dog upon retreating after seeing it.
• The Magic School Bus: In "Hops Home", there is an opossum that makes rodent-like noises.
• Magilla Gorilla: Whenever Magilla tries to act like a wild gorilla, he produces a Tarzan-esque yell. This is carried over to Magilla's cameo in Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?.
• The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack: Played for Laughs with "The Man With a Little Girl's Voice" — the titular Man is actually just a very brawny woman. Her daughter Cindy has an extremely deep, masculine voice, and her pet bulldog meows like a cat. There's a lot going on there.
• PAW Patrol:
  • Eagles are portrayed realistically enough as territorial and fierce potential predators. They do not, however, screech as red-tailed hawks do in reality, contrary to most encounters in this program. That much has still been Downplayed, what with more realistic eagle chirps used once in a while, however.
  • A great white shark seemed to snarl in the episode "Aqua Pups: Pups Save a Merdinger"; this also happens when they appear in other "Aqua Pups" episodes. In reality, sharks do not have the vocal chords needed to roar or snarl, though it could be a similar sound via suction through its gills. An episode in the spinoff show, Rubble & Crew, had a character mention that they do not snarl, nonetheless.
  • The same applies to Wally the walrus' California sea lion barks – walruses do bark amongst many other sounds, but theirs sound deeper in real life.
  • The black bears and polar bears that appear in this show do so with stock grizzly sounds – this video shows that the three species do sound similar, though not exactly the same.
  • Averted with a narwhal's sounds roughly matching that of the real-life counterpart, during "Sea Patrol: Pups Save a Narwhal".
  • Hippos are depicted here oinking like pigs – hippos in real-life sound like this.
• Phineas and Ferb:
  • Perry the Platypus makes a distinctive chirping chatter that is notably his only vocalization. Real-life platypuses make a soft growling purr when agitated (which admittedly sounds somewhat like Perry's noises).
  • The dodo in "Last Train to Bustville" makes a weird "narg narg" call. The dodo was actually named for its call, which was a pigeon-like sound something like "doo-doo".
• Puppy in My Pocket: Adventures in Pocketville:
  • Cats in the show often growl more like dogs than real-life cats, complete with their teeth baring like a dog would.
  • Eva is an especially notable example. This is averted in the French dub.
• Sarah & Duck: Duck is a male mallard, yet he quacks like a female one. In real-life, male mallards cannot properly quack, with their call sounding more raspy and quiet.
• Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: The bats that flutter across the screen at the start of the opening credits all chitter their little heads off. Disturbed bats generally book it without emitting cries that humans can hear, as they're too busy echolocating so they don't run into one another.
• The Simpsons:
  • "Diggs": Comic Book Guy gets a falcon that mimics human speech like a parrot, which he lampshades. Funnily enough, falcons are actually related to parrots.
  • "The Musk That Fell to Earth": Averted. A bald eagle makes accurate chirping noises, to the point that the family names it "Squawky". Other episodes, however, has it make the stereotypical red-tailed hawk cry.
  • "Treehouse of Horror XXIX": In the last segment, Jacqueline turns into a dinosaur and makes roaring noises. Said dinosaur is a Parasaurolophus, believed to have made trumpeting bellows due to its hollow crest.
  • "Gorillas on the Mast" has an orca that makes humpback whale songs (orcas chirp and squeak like other dolphins) and tigers that purr (something big cats don't).
• Squidbillies: In "Ol' Hootie", there is an owl that makes the generic red-tailed hawk screech.
• Tom and Jerry: Played for Laughs. Jerry can make a guttural, bull-like bellowing when he needs to frighten or intimidate Tom.
• The Venture Bros.: The Sovereign makes the typical Red Tailed Hawk call when he turns into an eagle. But then he's a nameless shapeshifter pretending to be David Bowie pretending to be an eagle...
• The Wild Thornberrys: In one episode, a hungry male lion trying to hunt Eliza briefly gets stuck in a thorn bush and roars like a grizzly bear.