Viral video of infant giving bread to cat was set up

by Michael Broad · September 21, 2021

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Infant offers bread to a community cat in India? Screenshot.

Was this infant directed by his parents to give bread to a community cat? The news media is stating that this infant’s gesture of offering bread to a stray cat was an act of ‘sharing is caring’. Coming from an infant it was exceptional and the Twitter video has gone mildly viral. But if you look at the video, the child wanders up to the cat with some bread in his hand and when he has approached the cat, he looks up at the person filming the encounter. The child then looks at the bread in his hand and offers it to the cat.

Sharing is caring.. ❤️ pic.twitter.com/W0CEhOSYsZ
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden_) September 18, 2021

Note: This is an embedded tweet. 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.

Typical comment on the video:

Omg that clip of the little boy sharing his bread with the cat is so cute. I wish more humans were as kind hearted towards animals

Yes, that is the objective of the video. My interpretation of the meeting between cat and child is that the video maker decided to construct a video by engineering it. It was ‘scripted’ by the child’s parent or parents. The infant’s father or mother was telling the child to offer the bread to the cat. That’s my take on this, rightly or wrongly.

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Twitter comments have hyped it up which is understandable. But I think the majority of people viewing the video are not taking into account the fact that a lot of social media videos are quite carefully constructed by individuals because they’ve become aware that internet businesses purchase videos and advertising money can be made from homemade videos.

A viral video getting a five million views can earn a reasonable amount of advertising money, perhaps several thousand dollars. This motivates people to take advantage of situations such as the one we see in the video on this page. This is why many videos on YouTube for instance are based on animal abuse. I am referring to the constructed animal rescue videos. They are horrible and cynical.

We don’t know where the video was made. It looks like one of the Asian countries. My guess is India. The cat is a domesticated stray cat (a community cat) with a tabby-and-white coat.

Cats don’t eat bread! We know that. The video maker also knew that. The world knows it. The cat rejects the bread but seems to head butt the infant’s hand in a gesture of friendship. That’s nice and it tells us the cat craves human contact.

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