Soapbox: Let sleeping cats lie
Pudge is four years old. She is fluffy, flat-faced and a fanatic of coconut oil. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she has a P.O. Box through which she receives fan mail from her half-million adoring Facebook and Instagram followers.
For those who have not already gathered from the very subtle headline of this column, Pudge is a cat. Albeit a very adorable cat that likes to sit in boxes and play with strings, as cats are wont to do, Pudge is nothing more than a calico exotic shorthair that has inexplicably achieved internet stardom.
Pudge is not alone in her feline fame. She joins the ranks of Colonel Meow (may he rest in peace), Lil Bub and, now the star of her own Lifetime Christmas special, Grumpy Cat.
Sorry, what? A feature film about a cat that would prefer to spend 20 hours of the day snoozing in patches of sunlight rather than be surrounded by strangers on a movie set?
Sure, it’s Lifetime — home of the sappiest made-for-TV movies known to mankind — but is there no end to the rat race for ratings and cash? If nobody else will recognize the current injustice hidden beneath billions of clever memes and YouTube montages, let the message of this column ring out over the frosty mountaintops: it is time to stop exploiting cats for the mirth of humans.
Internet memes alone are not the problem and neither are photos or videos illustrating curious cat behavior. The predicament lies in the exaggerated anthropomorphization of the stars of these memes, photos and videos.
According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, to anthropomorphize is to “to attribute human form or personality to things not human,” like, say, cats. Like, say, attributing a grumpy personality to a cat with a permanently down-turned mouth due to feline dwarfism and then toting the “unhappy” fur ball to publicity gigs and passing it around for selfies with celebrities.
It’s ridiculous. Cats don’t even have opposable thumbs; how are they supposed to select the most flattering Instagram filter, let alone take a selfie in the first place?
Writer Kwame Opam worded it perfectly in “Grumpy Cat’s new movie shows she should have stayed a meme” from the online news site TheVerge.com: “Can any of us honestly imagine life being anything other than grump-inducing for Grumpy Cat at this point? Isn’t it possible that we’re in fact making her grumpy by this unnecessary adulation? When will we stop allowing this cat to be trotted around like a circus act? When will the cash grabs cease? Is there literally no other animal we can passively make memes of? The party’s over. It’s time to let Grumpy Cat just be a cat.”
Amen, Opam, amen.
It matters not whether one identifies as a dog person or a cat person; hopefully we can all identify as humane people. Animal behavior makes us laugh, so we want to share that glee with others. I’m definitely guilty of this. I recently held a very important household meeting to show all my roommates “If I fits, I sits: the Supercut” — a glorious video collection of kittens and puppies trying to squeeze into snug spaces.
I am one of Pudge’s 600,000 followers. Am I contributing to the problem? Maybe. For now, Pudge’s human seems to have mostly preserved the innocent, lazy identity that makes her the cat she was born to be. However, the day I see Pudge starring in a Hallmark channel Thanksgiving miniseries, I’m out.
— Noelle is a senior majoring in Spanish and print journalism. She has been publicly, ruthlessly attacking pop culture since last week. Send birthday party invites to noellejohansen@gmail.com or on Twitter @broelle.