Harmful Animal Memes
There are many ways that people use social media and memes to perpetuate bad pet ownership. One of the most negative things people do is documenting animals/pets in dangerous or unhealthy situations for content. One example is how we cute-ify overweight animals, which can cause people to believe that it’s normal for animals to be overweight. Another example is people who film cats making “strange sounds,” which are often distress or warning cries, and posting them with captions of “how funny” their cat sounds. I think it’s obvious that pet posting has gone too far and when posts like these go viral it only enforces that treating animals this way is normal.
The meme I chose for this assignment depicts a cat, Henry, who appears to be gray but, according to the text, he is an orange cat who got inside of a chimney. Henry’s owner acknowledges in their post that they did not even notice that this “gray” cat was Henry and had just assumed that they had a “visitor cat” in their home.
This meme demonstrates numerous red flags of pet ownership. Why was the chimney not gated off? Presumably if this family had children they would have gated the chimney so why is it different for a pet? Also, how frequently does this family have “visitor cats” that they can’t even keep track of their own cat? And do they realize that allowing strange cats into their home puts Henry at risk of health issues like FeLV, or risk of injury if he gets into a fight with a strange cat? I also have questions about the aftermath of this. I can only hope that after taking this photo they immediately gave Henry a bath but did they take him to the vet to make sure he didn’t inhale or ingest anything harmful? Or at the very least keep a close eye on his behavior over the next few days to make sure he wasn’t displaying any unusual behavior?
Healthy Animal Memes
I had somewhat of a difficult time coming up with a way to counteract this meme. I think it’s because I believe that we should keep animals out of memes altogether. Eventually I decided to use the “expanding brain” meme template to show that an animal’s health and happiness improves when their owner is mindful of those things. I used images of my cat, Dipper, who has gone through a lot of things in the last several years. I used images that showed marked improvement in his health and happiness.
I don’t think my meme would go viral because it’s not necessarily funny or relatable. Luckily I think we are seeing a shift in animal content to more educational content about animal health and behavior in a way that doesn’t take away from funny or cute animal content. For example this TikTok, where a vet office shows off how we can definitely find chunky animals cute while also mentioning his health needs. As a whole I don’t know the solution for the vitality of harmful content. Possibly education on how to identify harmful content such that we are more equipped to ignore it and retrain the algorithms that promote the content?
