Steve Allen on LBC radio mentioned that somebody had accused Kate Beckinsale of cat abuse. Steve Allen was flicking through the newspapers and commenting. I pricked up my ears and a few hours later discovered what I think is the reason why she had received the accusation.
Before I proceed, I’d like to mention that Kate Beckinsale is Oxford University educated and highly attractive. She is very successful and deserves praise for these attributes and attainments.
Like many very attractive women she has an Instagram account. And we know that Instagram accounts need feeding like voracious lions. You have got to constantly add photographs and videos to them. Kate Beckinsale needs to feed her equally voracious 5.2 million followers with stimulating and titillating pics and vids.
We also know that Beckinsale likes cats and lives with Clive and Willow, both contemporary Persians. In the past I’ve seen her carrying Clive, in a baby carrier strapped to her front. It allowed her to walk around and provide her cat with a little bit of outdoor stimulation in safety. That’s okay I think as long as the cat accepts being strapped in like this for more than a short time. Not many cats would accept it. Mine certainly wouldn’t.
Note: Google Adsense AI thinks the picture of Beckinsale is ‘sexual content’ so I can’t show it 😊. It’s true. Tell me what you think.
Her latest video is the one which I think has gathered this criticism. She puts on a poodle mask and stalks Willow (I believe) around her, large, cream sofa. The house looks amazing. And so does her cat. The image portrays an exotic, rarefied lifestyle that fans like to lap up like a cat lapping up cream.
Note: This is a video from another website which is embedded here. Sometimes they are deleted at source which stops them working on this site. If that has happened, I apologise but I have no control over it.
And like a typical wild cat, Kate Beckinsale’s Persian first cowers with anxiety in the face of this strange, humanoid poodle, and then defends herself by slapping the muzzle of the poodle mask. She does this twice at which point Beckinsale lies down. I guess she had proved her point; she should not adopt a poodle. I presume that she might have had some notions about doing that.
All the comments to the video express fun and amusement. One said “Your cat is going to need therapy.”
So, the tricky question is whether Kate Beckinsale has been abusive towards her cat and deliberately frightening her. It depends on your point of view. That’s a copout. My point of view is that I’d never do this.
I understand; she did it in order to entertain her followers on Instagram. She has to dream up new ideas and her cats are great in videos and pics. However, without wishing to lecture, it is not acceptable in my honest opinion to provoke your cat to respond like this and cause anxiety in the interests of entertaining people. Social media influencers should not entertain people by frightening an animal. Therefore, it is an example of mild abuse. I don’t think that can be denied. However, we should not make too much of it.
It’s one of those social media moments. I can remember some research on funny cat videos in which they concluded that about 30% of cats in the videos had been anxious and stressed during the making of the video. A lot of funny cat videos (and Beckinsale’s video might qualify for this category) entail making a cat anxious or putting them through a stressful moment. This is because the cat’s reaction is what makes the video interesting or sometimes funny.
This video is meant to be amusing. In some ways it is but in other ways it isn’t. All really good cat caregivers don’t want to see a cat made unnecessarily anxious.
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