The internet loves pets

If you are thinking about mistreating some cute animal, you might want to reconsider it.

And, if you must end the life of some adorable little creature, you may want to make sure you do it in a space vacuum where none of your actions can be catalogued.
Otherwise, you might end up upsetting the most dangerous parts of the Internet. It’s a sad fact, but despite peace activists being killed in South Africa and thousands being displaced by floods in Pakistan, the Internet at large is best at mobilizing around cuddly critters.
     
It doesn’t really matter if the hurt caused was intentional or not — flaunting any animal abuse will get the plebeians of the World Wide Web all riled up.
 
But you don’t have to take my words of caution. Just consider the case of a young woman clad in a red hoodie and white sneakers who plucked puppies out of a cardboard box and then hurled them into a gushing river to drown a noiseless death.
She probably felt some sense of privacy as she was chucking these young pups into the water, but that didn’t stop the video from going viral. It caught the attention of 4chan’s infamous board, a dark and murky ghetto of the Internet that was happy to collect clues from the scene and track her down.
 
It’s suspected that she’s from either Croatia or Bosnia, but her location hasn’t been pinpointed. Now she’s being fined $6,400, and while she claims her grandmother told her to do it, she’s getting no sympathy from the communities of the World Wide Web.
   
If that’s not enough to scare you away from hurting animals, then consider the woman out of London who was caught on a surveillance camera dumping a cat into a trash bin. She had simply been stroking the cat when she decided to pick the animal up and throw it in a nearby trash can.

The cat, whose name is Lola, meowed for about 15 hours before being rescued by her rightful owners.
 
The story basically follows the same pattern as above. Her videotaped action offended enough people to have her identity investigated by computer nerds, and now she’s receiving threats from those who want to get back at her for what she did. Police are even stationed at her door for her own protection.

So what is the moral of the story?  Don’t hurt animals — at least not the cute ones. Even if you think you are going to get away with it, your actions could always end up as a featured video on YouTube. It really is to bad the capabilities of the Internet cannot be utilized into a greater force of good, but who can say that the puppies and kittens of the world don’t deserve a protector of their own?


E-mail: danfleis@indiana.edu