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What is it about cats?
Ben Machell
Last updated at 12:01AM, October 6 2012
Do you think Lil Bub is cute? Have you viewed
Surprised Kitty? You are not alone. Millions of us love
watching videos of cats online. Ben Machell finds the
small furry animals (and their owners) who have
become stars of the internet
In August last year, Mike Bridavsky received a text message from a friend who knew
that he was a cat person. They were having trouble finding a home for a kitten, a tiny
female tabby afflicted with several genetic mutations including dwarfism, a deformed
lower jaw and an extra toe on each foot. Bridavsky, who runs a recording studio in
Bloomington, Indiana, was intrigued. “I went to see her, instantly fell in love and
brought her back to my apartment. I took her with the expectation that she wouldn’t
survive for more than a few months,” he says today, speaking from his home. “But it
turned out she was very healthy.” She was also, in her own special way, insanely cute.
Bridavsky named her “Lil Bub”. Or “Bub”, for short.
As with his four other cats, the 32-year-old Bridavsky, who is bearded, heavily tattooed
and softly spoken, began posting pictures of Bub on his Facebook page. “I just liked to
show everyone the funny things my cats were doing.” Almost immediately, though, the
response to Bub was different. Where his previous cat snapshots might have attracted
“maybe 20 ‘likes’” – “likes” being the currency of online public approval – the first
photo of Bub earned more than 100. He posted a few more and the public response was
again emphatic: people seemed to love seeing pictures of Bub. Bridavsky created a blog
especially for her, with picture captions written as though Bub herself were speaking to
the reader. “I didn’t really think too much about it. It was just for fun.”
As more and more people visited Bub’s website, Bridavsky began to receive messages
from strangers. “At first they kind of scared me,” he admits. “The first really heavy one
was from someone saying they were having the worst time at grad school, and that
pictures of Lil Bub were the only thing getting them through. Since then, they’ve got a
lot heavier. Messages from parents whose children are chronically ill. I get multiple
messages each day saying, ‘I was in the worst mood, but Lil Bub is the only thing
helping me through.’”
This summer, Bub and Bridavsky were contacted by Good Morning America and flown
to New York City to appear on the programme, with Bub billed as “the cutest cat in the
world”. Today, you can buy branded Lil Bub T-shirts, bags and stickers from her
website (Bridavsky ships “around 150” items per week). People contact Bridavsky to tell12-10-6 What is it about cats? | The Times
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him they are getting tattoos of his pet. In many ways, Bub now belongs to the world.
“She is really famous; there’s no going back now. But this was never a goal of mine,
having a famous cat,” says Bridavsky with what sounds a lingering sense of
bemusement. “I mean, it hasn’t even been a year since I started posting photos.”
The story of Bub is not an isolated case. The internet has been making celebrities out of
cats for years. For all the limitless possibilities presented by the growth of the world
wide web, we have dedicated countless hours to creating and sharing images and
videos of cats being cute or silly or strange. Even if you only occasionally go online, you
will have noticed this. Perhaps somebody has shown you “Surprised Kitty”, a 17-second
YouTube clip of a kitten being tickled (65 million views), or introduced you to “Maru”,
a Scottish Fold from Japan who is mostly filmed jumping in and out of boxes. (Maru’s
YouTube channel has 176,810,669 views, more than Lady Gaga’s.) Maybe you’ve come
across blogs dedicated to cats that look like Hitler (catsthatlooklikehitler.com), or
wearing clothes (whatifcatsworepeopleclothes.tumblr.com), or looking indifferent in
the background of amateur porn films (I’d better not include the link, but you can find
it).
It’s even possible that you remember early interactions between cats and the internet,
such as “cat scanning”, a trend born in the late Nineties that produced surreal images
of cats pressed against computer scanners (“Got a cat? Got a scanner? The choice is
clear,” exclaims one such website). In any case, cats are today a keystone of web
culture, the furry Yin to internet pornography’s fleshy Yang. The half-joke maxim that,
“If it exists, there is porn of it,” can increasingly be applied to felines: “If it exists,
someone has made a cat video of it.”
We don’t actually know how much of the internet is about cats. We do know that, last
December, Google conducted an experiment at its top-secret X Lab facility, creating a
neural network of 16,000 computers as part of an effort to create a machine capable of
learning on its own. They fed this “brain” a random selection of images from 10 million
YouTube videos. One result was that, such is the prevalence of cat videos online, the
computer brain was able to teach itself what a cat was. “We never told it, ‘This is a
cat,’” Google Fellow Jeff Dean later told The New York Times. “It basically invented
the concept.”
Secret laboratories are not the only places where we can find evidence of our continued
appetite for cat videos. In August, 10,000 people travelled to the Walker Arts Centre in
Minneapolis for the inaugural Internet Cat Video Film Festival. One of them was
William Braden, a videographer from Seattle. Braden left with the “Golden Kitty”
award for his Henri 2: Paw de Deux, a two-minute, black-and-white pastiche of
French avant-garde cinema, featuring a pampered cat called “Henri” (actually a family
member’s pet, Henry) who nevertheless lives in a state of bleak, existential crisis. It’s
funny – clever rather than outright cute – and currently has 5.6 million views on
YouTube.
Like Bridavsky, Braden has been given an advance for a funny book about Henri. Like
Bridavsky, he also earns some income from a monetised YouTube channel and from
selling Henri-related merchandise (his online store brings in “almost $1,000 every
week, and I get a certain percentage of that”). Last month, Braden decided to quit his12-10-6 What is it about cats? | The Times
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job shooting wedding and commercial videos, and work full-time in what you could
legitimately term the cat video industry. “I’m not making hundreds of thousands of
dollars by any means, and I don’t have any illusion that this is going to be for the rest of
my life,” he tells me. “But I don’t have a wife and kids and I’d be doing myself a
disservice if I tried to do too many other things at once. It’s better just to focus on this
while it’s popular.” At the film festival, people would cheer him and come up to ask for
photographs together. He laughs. “It felt funny and surreal, but any last bit of
embarrassment or cynicism I had about making a living from cat videos was wiped
away at that moment.”
Given that his video was conceived for laughs, Braden says he is struck by just how
devoted people are to Henri. He has created a Facebook page where he, in the “voice” of
Henri, posts messages for his followers. “I’ve gained a lot of new insight into the lives of
American women from the ages of 45 to 65, because they form the lion’s share of
Henri’s fans. They feel a real sense of propriety over him. So whenever I write
something that seems slightly out of character for Henri, they let me know about it.”
Braden explains how he once had Henri post a joke on his Facebook page that many
fans deemed to be in poor taste. “I got private messages saying, ‘This is not funny at all.
I don’t know who is writing Henri’s page, but Henri would never say anything like
that.’ That’s when I realised that there were people out there who took this much more
seriously than I did.”
It was an important lesson. Braden had originally flattered himself that his video was
so popular because people appreciated and were entertained by the sophisticated (for
cat videos) conceit. Actually, what people like is Henri, because Braden has given him a
voice and personality. When, on Facebook, Henri expresses his ennui, fans will respond
in droves, offering to care for him, to cheer him up by feeding him tuna and clipping
his whiskers, as though they really were talking to a depressed French cat.
Speaking on the phone, Braden is cheery but realistic. He accepts that he is now
effectively trapped into both maintaining and perpetuating the existence of a fictional
cat. “If I just turned around and said, ‘I want his character to be different because I’m
bored now,’ everything would be gone in a second. Because of the fickle nature of the
internet, of modern society, the plug would come out and I’d just be a footnote in the
history of cat videos,” he chuckles. “I have to be wary of that now that these people are
paying my bills.”
So we know that a lot of people really like internet cats, liking them even more than we
perhaps ever imagined. But still, why cats? There exist popular videos and blogs
dedicated to other creatures, such as dogs and chimpanzees and babies, but nothing
comes close to matching the sheer volume of cat material. To start with, there are
simple practical considerations: lots of people have cats, lots of people now have the
means to take pictures or record videos of their cats via smartphones, etc, ergo, lots of
people will make videos of their cats and share them online.
But there is, obviously, more to it, something about the nature of cats themselves. I
speak to clinical psychologist Dr Cecilia Felice. She begins by saying what everyone I
talk to on the subject says, which is that cats are naturally enigmatic, more of a blank12-10-6 What is it about cats? | The Times
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screen, which means we are able to project onto them a whole range of character and
personality traits. We can normally hazard a guess as to what dogs or chimps or babies
are thinking, so we don’t create such elaborate personas for them. But cats we can
anthropomorphise to our hearts’ content (especially if we force them into human
clothes, or write captions in “their” voices, or point out that they look a bit like German
dictators).
“I also think there is something about that archetypal cat worship that goes right back
to the Egyptians and Isis,” says Felice. “We mustn’t underestimate that. It’s important.
It’s in our DNA. They are very small, so they appeal to the parental side of us that wants
to baby small furry things with big eyes. They also have a dark side to them, which is
somewhat refined, and makes us want to worship them. Temples might not be built to
them now but, in a way, a different sort of temple is being built, which is being able to
observe them online.”
But this wholesale online cat worship is also a result of some considerations the
Egyptians never had to contend with. For example, Felice understands why it can be
that some of us form such intense feelings of ownership towards cats like Lil Bub and
Henri. The internet, basically, lends itself to obsession. “It’s like having a pet without
any of the hassle of having a pet. But because you can replay these images again and
again and again, people can become very attached to them.”
The modern world in which we live plays a role, too. “Many, many millions of people
are now completely sedentary, sitting in an office in front of a computer screen very
disconnected from nature. And cats are elemental. Wild but domesticated. Seeing the
physicality of cats when you’re very sedentary yourself is going to make them all the
more compelling. Plus, it’s a way of connecting with other people in what seems an
increasingly fragmented world of disconnect. You sit next to people you’d rather e-mail
information to than talk to. Now, you can’t send porn around the office, but you can
send cats around the office,” she grins. “It’s a form of communication that is
completely socially acceptable.”
So there is today in our psyche a sweet spot that all these different cat pictures and
videos manage to hit. It is ironic, then, that the genre’s purest distillation of all this
does not even involve a real-life cat. In 2007, Simon Tofield, an illustrator from
Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, produced a short cartoon in an attempt to teach
himself a computer animation program. A cat lover, he decided the cartoon would
depict nothing more than a cat waking up its owner in order to be fed. Without his
knowledge, the 98-second clip ended up on YouTube. He only found out after it had
accrued three million views. “It went crazy, all around the world,” the 41-year-old
reflects. “But I didn’t sit down and think, ‘Cats are really popular, I’ll do a film on cats.’
Back in 2007, there wasn’t that much on the internet, but it’s cat mad now. Every year
that goes by, it gets more and more cat crazy.”
Tofield began producing more animations under the banner of “Simon’s Cat”. Five
years on, the official Simon’s Cat YouTube channel has 284,556,599 views (only
slightly less than Jay Z’s). He now employs two other animators as well as a brand
manager. Is he rolling in cat cash? “My life hasn’t changed at all,” he chuckles shyly. “I
still drive the same battered old car, live in the same battered old house. Hopefully one12-10-6 What is it about cats? | The Times
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day I’ll move.” (For all the YouTube hits, it seems videos won’t make you millions.) Like
Braden, he believes that people feel a strong sense of ownership towards his creation.
“They feel very passionately about it. A lot of people see the little mannerisms in the
animation and it reminds them of their own cat and makes them feel very attached. It’s
almost like they put their love for their own pet into Simon’s Cat.”
Are there any cat sites he particularly likes? “There was one called Cat-Shaming, where
you send pictures of your cat when they’ve done something naughty, with a sign next to
them saying, ‘I woke my master up this morning,’ or, ‘I’ve eaten a fish from the pond.’
That one made me laugh.”
And this is a point that is always worth remembering when trying to get your head
around the enduring popularity of cats online. Professionals like Tofield and Braden
are the exception. Rather, it is anonymous, everyday people who account for the vast
majority of the internet cat content that we consume. It sort of has to be, because much
of it is so niche and weird and, ultimately, ephemeral, that setting out to cash in on the
phenomenon must be like herding cats themselves.
Take the case of “lolcats”. Five years ago, Ben Huh came across a website dedicated to
the sharing of user-generated photos of cats accompanied by speech quotes written in
the idiosyncratic web dialect known as “lolspeak” (the site’s name, “I Can Has
Cheezburger?” is an example of this). Huh, a South Korean working in tech and living
in the States, convinced a group of investors to buy the website for $2.25 million (£1.38
million). “It was a risk for us all,” he tells me, speaking from the West Coast. “It wasn’t
a subject matter the investors understood. It felt odd. But at the end of the day when
we looked at the data, it was clear that people really loved this entertainment they were
creating for themselves. It was funny.”
Huh used the booming popularity of the site’s lolcat images (including two lolcat
books, both New York Times bestsellers) to fund a string of other humour and popular
web culture sites, now known as the “Cheezburger Network”, and last year raised $30
million (£18.5 million) in venture funding. He reflects on the turn of events. “To people
who don’t know the internet very well, it seems really odd. Almost unbelievable. But I
tell them that we’ve been so used to mass entertainment that we forget that sometimes
everyday life is the stuff that entertains us the most. So for people on the internet,
captioning cat photos is a way of bringing humour closer to home.”
And there is, ultimately, a universal appeal to cats that very little else online – whether
it’s pop music or porn – can rival. It’s not an accident. “We have been breeding cats for
10,000 years to make them cuter and more attractive, and then we’re surprised when
we adore them,” says Huh, who adds, plaintively, that he is allergic to their fur.
Cats, then, are only the stars of the internet because we keep on making them the stars.
They are not picked and packaged by entertainment executives, or marketed to us by
multinational companies. They are in our homes, and we share them, and we love
them. Perhaps the sedentary, modern world in which we live makes them seem more
magical than ever and, as Huh says, cats are beautiful to us because we’ve bred them to
be beautiful to us. Then give half the world a video camera and don’t be surprised at
the results. The idea that the internet is dotted with modern-day cat temples does not
 
Send
now, to me, seem like a far-fetched theory. The Egyptians would go nuts for Simon’s
Cat.
Back in Indiana, Mike Bridavsky considers the future for himself and Lil Bub. “There
are a lot of things happening. We signed a contract with a book agency, so we’re
working on that right now, and it will probably be distributed around the world. I’ve
been approached by aggressive businesspeople trying to cash in,” he says quietly
(Bridavsky gives much of the money he earns through Bub to animal charities). “I’ve
had people getting in touch wanting to be her publicist, saying they can get her on this
TV show or that TV show. But if I hire someone to get me on a bunch of shows because
of my cat, it just seems completely backward and weird. People dictate how famous she
is,” he finishes, “not me.”
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