1 week Ago By Pravina-rudra
Social media has become such a cesspit it makes us cry out for some wholesome content – and who can resist a cute video of an animal? A dog walking on its hind legs, a loris raising its arms each time a human tickles it, a frog making a funny sound – these sorts of videos give us a hit of dopamine as we scroll through the doom. So we forward them onto our friends to bring a ray of sunshine to their day, too. Now there are also more dramatic clips, like the ones of people courageously saving animals’ lives.
A puppy tied up in a bag is rescued on camera, and monkeys are pulled from the mud they’re stuck in. What’s not to love? Plenty, it turns out. The Social Media Animal Cruelty Coalition found that in many of these “rescue” videos, animals had been intentionally harmed or placed in dangerous situations , so that the content creator can swoop in and appear to heroically rescue the animal.
The puppy in the bag and the monkeys in the mud were just two examples. Over a three-month period, the campaigners identified 605 links to social media content showing different forms of staged rescue. Kittens, puppies and young monkeys were the main targets.
Little is known about what happened to the animals after the creators put their cameras away. The clout and profit from this is considerable: those 605 posts alone had been viewed over five hundred million times, and 21 per cent of the fake rescue creators identified by the campaigners were begging viewers for donations, usually via PayPal links. Even the less dramatic animal content can be dodgy, too .
That viral video of a dog walking on her hind legs was only possible because she had been cruelly trained to walk that way. The loris was actually terrified and raising its arms in self-defence. The cute noise the frog made was because it was screaming out in terror at something just off-camera.
Read Next Hedgehogs are about to disappear - this is how we save them More than 30 countries, including Britain, have banned the use of animals in circuses. Elephants and bears will no longer be driven and forced to perform demeaning and unnatural tricks to entertain the public. With hindsight, it’s so hard to believe that we used to cheer circus stunts that were obviously only possible because of immense cruelty behind the scenes.
Now, we’ve turned that blind eye to social media content. We don’t see the cruelty off camera, so we coo at the cute animals, cheer on the heroic rescuers and click the “share” button. Maybe even “tip” the creator, too.
The circus has moved online. We are trained from childhood to look the other way on animal suffering. We’re told that the animal on our plate had a good life, even though cows, pigs, sheep and chickens are slaughtered at a tiny fraction of their natural lifespan and 85 per cent of them spent their shortened lives in the industrial misery of factory farms.
The meat and dairy bosses don’t show us that – just like the content creators keep the truth hidden. But there are ways to spot dodgy “rescue” videos. If you look beyond the individual video and check the whole account, you can look for red flags.
Does the page have multiple rescue videos? Is the “rescuer” always the same person, and are they associated with any genuine animal organisations? Does it seem likely that a genuine rescuer would have set up cameras and pressed “record” before saving an animal from imminent death? A lot of this is common sense. Of course animals didn’t perform tricks in circuses because they wanted to, of course content creators don’t just happen to keep stumbling upon animals that need rescuing – and of course we can’t kill 90 billion animals each year for their food in a way that’s anything other than horrific. If you see a dodgy animal video, don’t engage with this content at all, because even thumbing it down or leaving a critical comment is marked as engagement that increases its spread.
Simply report it directly to the platform instead – and then ask yourself who else is getting rich by hiding animal suffering from you..
