NEWS AND COMMENT: This story illustrates how brands rapidly distance themselves from any partner with whom they work who’s been involved in animal abuse. And it doesn’t seem to matter whether it happened many years ago when the person was very young. Animal abuse is a no-no for businesses who use Instagram influencers to drum up business.
Here is a series of photos (screenshots) of the story. The admission, the excuse, the sacking.
It is great to see this but it is in stark contrast to many businesses which harm wildlife as a spin-off to their commercial enterprises such as habitat destruction. Think farmers and the Amazon rainforest. I guess it depends on the circumstances.
If a business can get away with animal abuse, they probably will but if they sponsor an attractive woman like Emma Claiir who’s got a presence on Instagram, they simply can’t be connected to that person if they admit to animal cruelty and then giggle afterwards.
It was a very big faux pas by Emma to tell her co-host and the world on a podcast called Simply Chaotic that she killed a cat when she was a child when asked to disclose a secret.
She said that she didn’t mean to do it but she was swinging her cat around and let go. She claims that the cat died of fright but that would seem to be very unlikely. The cat probably died of blunt force trauma.
And then she went on to disclose another cat killing of hers; killing her best friend’s cat by accident as well.
That pretty well terminated any contracts that she had with businesses in one fell swoop. The first company to drop Emma was MCoBeauty. That happened last Wednesday. They were followed by a vegan make-up company called Last Minerals. And they were followed by fashion retailers Glassons and Princess Polly who all dumped her.
She must be devastated and is probably deeply regretting disclosing those two terrible secrets. Influencers can make good money. Sometimes they are cats (see below). Cats cannot contract with a business! They don’t have the legal capacity.
The commercial world can be a bit cruel. She was a child at the time and although killing the family cat is a terrible thing to do, you have to give a child a little bit of leeway. Perhaps as much to blame were her parents for not instructing her and supervising her to handle the family cat properly.
It is simply untenable for a business to partner with a person who admits animal cruelty in any context. Especially when that business is a vegan company which has to promote animal respect and animal welfare. Animal abuse discloses to the world that the person’s character is questionable which bars them from publicised commercial arrangements.
Lust Minerals confirmed their disconnection from Emma Claiir in a lengthy Instagram post which stated in part:
We are deeply saddened by the events that have taken place regarding Emma Claiir. Lust Minerals does not condone any cruelty of any kind. We stand by our values – our products are cruelty-free and vegan-certified…
They added that they take matters like this very seriously and therefore had to end “all activity with Emma Claiir.
Perhaps the bigger issue is how children interact with family cats. How many children harm them? How many children do something similar to that described by Emma? These are all untold stories. We don’t know the answer to the question. But my guess is that it happens quite a lot.
We can glean a hint about this problem from an article on the Children’s’ Hospital of Philadelphia website. They rather tellingly state that “Cat scratch disease is most common in people younger than 20”. In other words, young people are getting scratched more often adult people and I suspect that a lot of the young people are very young and they were scratched through mishandling.
Tammy Hembrow’s infant daughter, Posy, clambers all over the family’s Ragdoll cat Bubbles
‘thatlittlepuff’ is TikTok’s biggest earner at $26k per post (June 2022)
“…Have a giggle about…” a so-called “accident” where at least two cats died? Bizarre and disgusting!
she looks drunk or thick as two planks anyway
Yes, I get that. Perhaps she was a little boozed up when she made the faux pas.
Yes, the giggle gave the game away about her true feelings about the cat killings.