Viral Animals


Sometimes I wonder if animals were invented to save us from the Internet. Or, more gloomily, to entice us to stay on the Internet. Because, whatever else this trickster demon of world wide interconnectivity brings us, we'll always have cute pics and vids of creatures to ease the pains. My Twitter feed is a doomscroll of angry political opinions, desperate good-hearted folks raging against various dying lights, men being absolute dicks to women, natural and unnatural disasters, and lots and lots of talented people publishing amazing books while my own effort languishes somewhere in an ambiguous void. But, like jewels, out pop various wholesome images of adorable animals doing adorable things. I added one such to Instagram this morning, catching Marble and Finch in a pleasingly photogenic pose. And on the whole this is amazing and lovely and wonderful, and rarely fails to raise a smile. But sometimes I wonder. What is this abundance of animal cutesyness doing to our psyche in relation to fauna? What do we get from making Grumpy Cat a minor celebrity?

Yesterday's encounter was a minor viral video of a cockatoo named Einstein saying hello to some new-born kittens. The video is a minute and a half long, the cockatoo is in the foreground on the left of the frame, and we look over his shoulder at a box containing a mother cat and her four kittens. The text of the tweet says the kittens are 19 days old. They spend the first part of the video suckling, then start wandering around the box in that wobbly-sleepy way. Off camera, the tweeter narrates the scene in a pleasingly soft Texan (I think) accent and informs us that this is the first time that Einstein has seen the kittens. The mother cat, Delilah, seems pretty chill with the presence of the cockatoo. She remains lying down and miaows quietly a couple of times. The voice tells us that Delilah and Einstein are already friends. Einstein bobs his head, says 'hello', at one point says 'hi Einstein' and occasionally clicks his tongue. Ostensibly, the inference is that Einstein is introducing himself to the kittens. Towards the end, he turns to the camera and clicks his tongue, his eye wide as if in amazement.

Now, as viral animal videos go, this is a pretty inoffensive, indeed, loveable one. A quick scroll through the rest of the tweeter's feed shows that all animals are well looked after: Delilah was a rescue cat who came already pregnant, Einstein appears to have a lot of freedom, and everything seems fine and dandy. I'm not entirely convinced by the keeping of birds as pets, but if we go down that line of reasoning we'll start to question why we keep any animal as a pet and I'm no one to talk in that department. But what I do want to ask is; what is the cockatoo actually thinking and saying in that video? I don't know enough about cockatoos to say for sure (does anyone?), but I would hazard a guess that it is not a simple as 'hello'. We see its crest raise and it cocks and bobs its head around a lot, which probably means it is excited to a certain degree, but I also get a sense that it is wary of these new arrivals. Perhaps it is assessing a threat? Perhaps it is a little perturbed about this quite profound change to its immediate environment? The narrator makes some reassuring statements; yeah, you're just talking very happily to the kitties - perhaps she is reassuring Einstein, perhaps she is reassuring Delilah, perhaps she is reassuring us, the viewers, and herself. And perhaps all the reassurance works. There is often a symbiotic cycle of reassurance from human to pet that keeps everything in order and in check - this is definitely a key element of our relationship with dogs. 

In this case, I'm pretty sure that off camera everything turns out a-ok and all the creatures, including the human, continue to live in lovely harmony. Well, I hope they do. I hope Einstein isn't stressed or worried by this strange new change. No doubt I'm being over-sensitive, but I'm increasingly trying to turn my analytic eye to such videos while my entertainment eye still gets drawn inexorably in. We have not been careful with viral animal videos. The classic case here is the video of the tickled slow loris, with his big cartoon eyes and his ridiculous arms stretched up as if inviting further play. It has since been revealed that the tickling of the loris was actually the torturing of the loris, and that said loris had been captured and declawed to be sold on as a pet. The viral video only increased the slow loris pet trade, and no doubt the tickle torture has been replicated across the land. This, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg. I've seen way too many 'hilarious' videos of cats and dogs in deep distress, whether its the former being frightened by cucumbers or the latter using all of their resolve to resist biting a toddler that is prodding and poking them in the face. Meanwhile, our most Instagrammable animals tend to be the most 'desirable' designer breeds, like the infamous 'micropigs', or Grumpy Cat, or those people who have adopted foxes as pets. It all leads to a consolidation of wanting the most ornamental of animals and the most exotic of pets, further fuelling the abhorrent industry of animal breeding, while the relatively 'boring' versions languish unwanted in rescues or worse.

It's high time we started thinking twice about viral animal videos. I've used a fairly harmless example here to spin myself off into these thoughts, and I don't mean to cast aspersions onto the owners of Einstein and Delilah. Nor do I condemn their decision to film and post that footage - I would have done exactly the same thing. But I want to throw a note of caution into the world. My wider point is this: life via the Internet is heavy and hard for us all right now, and will forever be, in one way or another. The web is well named because it ensnares us and is being spun by spiders with malevolent intentions. Animal videos have found their niche as our regular rays of light in a dark and murky world. But we cannot become dependent on them, because they do not always show our best side.

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