To the best of my knowledge, TikTok is infamous for featuring animal exploitation videos. By this I mean animals such as this ginger tabby domestic cat who is being exploited by their owner who makes a ‘funny cat video’ (not so funny for me) out of his gross obesity. This is irresponsible cat ownership. It seems to me that the owner deliberately overfed their cat to make them grossly obese with the intention of making funny cat videos on TikTok. The aim? To get those precious viewing numbers.
It is what I call achieving celebrity vicariously through your cat.
If I am correct, it is animal exploitation and abuse. And it happens a lot. It is shameful human behaviour. This is really horrible to see to be frank. It should never happen. TikTok are parties to this poor human behaviour. Their social media platform facilitates bad behavior.
You won’t see many cats more obese than this one. Clearly, it will cause severe health problems in the cat. This cat likes to stand up on his haunches which makes his obesity look even worse. I sense that he might want to do this because it feels more comfortable for him. Poor soul. It must be incredibly uncomfortable to be that fat. All his movements are restricted. It is so undignified to video this.
Like people, domestic cats can develop type II diabetes through obesity. And there has been an increase in type II diabetes in domestic cats in countries such as America and the UK. This is in parallel with an increase in obesity in domestic cats.
A cat this obese needs to be on a very long-term diet to reduce their weight very gradually to avoid fatty liver disease (hepatic lipidosis) which can be fatal. The advice for this cat owner would be to take their cat to a veterinarian and ask them for a diet regime but the likelihood of this happening is very slim.
I hate to see this sort of abuse. It is so careless and immoral to be frank. The sad fact is that social media has done a lot of harm as well as a lot of good. How it is used depends on the individual. Social media can bring the bad out in people as well as the good.
Animal rescue use social media well. It is a good cause. There’s too much ‘trial by social media’ too; people trolled and criticised without trolls understanding what is truly happening.
The desire to create content to achieve high hitting videos motivates people to abuse animals. The animals become assets, a means to increase viewing hits but not sentient beings to be well looked after.
