(Sorry, the title is a lie- this post contains exactly 0 reasons why cat videos are the death of culture. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are, though.)
While watching the Cat Video Fest at the Cornell Cinema, I couldn’t help comparing these innocuous home videos to a very different compilation of animal videos, the animal rights documentary Earthlings. Directed by activist Shaun Monson and narrated by celebrity vegan Joaquin Phoenix, Earthlings explores five reasons for human exploitation of other animals: pets, food, clothing, research, and entertainment. The film is composed entirely of real life footage of human treatment of animals in the United States. The pets segment mostly focuses on the cruelty of breeding practices, and the entertainment segment only covers circus animals, but I think the way that we use our pet cats for entertainment is also worthy of criticism.
Sitting in the packed theater, I found myself slightly disturbed each time the crowd erupted into laughter at an animal getting injured or frightened. On one hand, cat videos are a perfectly normal and mostly harmless form of media, and I can see how my reaction would appear to be a bit irrational. It is natural to find humor in these situations: Cats are generally graceful and vicious animals, so when a cat reacts strangely to something, the unexpected behavior makes us laugh. Also, we enjoy watching videos of other humans getting hurt or scared as well, as proven by the long-standing popularity of America’s Funniest Home Videos. We don’t just find cat videos funny because of “speciesism,” since we enjoy watching the same things happen to our own species.
However, I do think that there is a key difference between videos showing humans getting hurt and videos showing animals getting hurt: consent. An animal cannot agree to releasing footage of it being hurt or scared, and it is difficult to gauge the extent to which it was harmed in filming. I’m not saying that these types of cat videos are inherently immoral, but I do think there are some bizarre elements of sadism and exploitation inherent in cute videos of kitties being scared ¯\_(ツ)_/¯