IIn a quiet neighborhood in California’s capital city, residents have grown accustomed to the screaming tantrums of a two-year-old. “No, Merlin!” his mother can be heard yelling, bored with his favorite treat. “No more ice!”
“We haven’t had any complaints from the neighbors yet,” says Mia Alari, the mother in question. That may be because Marlin is the cutest 2-year-old in California. He’s also a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig.
Beautiful curly hair, Marlin is something of a local celebrity, having lived in the home since 2022 with Alari, her boyfriend, and a growing number of pets (a rat, a dog, the occasional cow). The family spends their days snorting and singing to each other, fighting over apples that have fallen in the garden, and ordering Pig Ucchinos at the drive-thru of the local Starbucks, to the delight of millions of TikTok viewers.
TikTok is home to an abundance of non-traditional pets like merlins; pigs, cows, snakes, millipedes, and more. Meanwhile, the global demand for exotic pets is On the riseAnd the market could become as profitable as the markets for cats and dogs.
Social media has helped make niche pets commonplace, fundamentally changing how we view animals, and with every new pig or porcupine that shows up in suburban neighborhoods, the conceptual lines between what we once thought of as “wild” and “tame” become blurred.
The trend raises ethical questions about our relationship with animals and our desire to keep them confined to our homes. “We see these little soundbites and clips that are cute and heartwarming, but we don’t really think carefully about the broader impacts on animals,” says philosopher and bioethicist Jessica Pierce.
Bringing what are typically thought of as farm animals into the home “blurs the lines of what we think of as a typical pet,” says Kate Goldie, who recently completed her doctorate on pig-human relationships. Because we know less about pigs outside of farms, their welfare needs may be harder to meet at home.
Exotic pets have been intriguing people for a long time, even before Lord Byron. Cambridge University had a pet bearBut social media risks rapidly accelerating this trend – sometimes for better, but usually for worse.
aLari had always wanted a pig. Two years ago, urged by a colleague, he bought a Vietnamese pig for $350 and “for the next 24 hours, a lot“Merlin was like my dog,” she says. The next day, she brought Merlin, then 15 pounds, back to her tiny apartment and potty trained him by hiding a puppy mat in his litter tray.
Merlin was a fast learner and quickly mastered the mat. Within two days he was lead trained and within five he was sitting, shaking hands and kissing on command. Within a few weeks he was using the “talking button” to request ice. This was a great way to train him. bunnyTikTok’s most famous sheepdog/poodle mix.
After a few months of filming our adventures together, White Claw can With Merlin, Starbucks 1 cup of ice or In and Out Alari gained a lot of attention with her lettuce-wrap-eating videos, and now has a following of 2.3 million on TikTok, which has enabled her to make a living from Merlin merchandise, brand partnerships, and monetized TikTok streams.
Merlin isn’t just one of those quirky pets that capture the attention of millions. Bruce the dairy cow, for example, Elias Herrera After spending some time on his uncle’s dairy farm, he was brought home to his Idaho home in early 2023. (Although Herrera and fans refer to Bruce as a cow, technically he is a male.)
For the past year and a half, Herrera has been posting videos depicting his home life with Bruce several times a week to an audience of more than a million. In a typical clip, Herrera prepares lunch and dinner alongside Bruce, the world’s worst sous chef, while his bovine friends wreak havoc in his kitchen. Like Alari, Herrera makes a full-time living from Bruce through brand partnerships and highly sought-after Bruce merchandise.
Some recent the study The rise in non-traditional and exotic pets can be seen in tandem with social media. The United States is the world’s leading pet-owning nation. Largest Market It’s geared towards exotic pets and is largely unregulated. Research They can be dangerous to the pets themselves, as well as to humans, who are at risk of disease, and they also threaten biodiversity, with species such as African grey parrots facing extinction, says Rosemary Clare Collard, author of Animal Smuggling: Vibrant Capital in the Global Exotic Pet Trade.
The criticism has been slow to catch on social media. “The nature of TikTok means we need a bit of shock factor. We want something more unique than just putting a hamster on your shoulder,” says Sahana Kagi, a YouTuber who owns three sugar gliders, a type of flying possum.
Kagi has stepped away from exotic pet content in recent years as the popularity of long-form educational content on YouTube has given way to shorter, more eye-catching videos on TikTok. As exotic animal content became more prevalent and less available, Kagi began to change her mind. “It’s really sad,” she says. “Before, I was collecting guns and cars and stuff to show how cool I was, and now I’m collecting exotic animals.”
Look closely beneath the cuteness and you’ll find moral ambiguity, creating confusion among viewers about how to treat non-traditional pets: “Nice one, Merlin!” some say, while others ask, “Why are all these yuppies living in the suburbs with a pig?”
“Although the animals are not being brutally beaten for our entertainment, they are still captured and treated as objects for our entertainment,” Pierce said. “I think this is an unfortunate effect of social media – it makes animals even more objectified.”
But as things stand, the ethical implications of feeding White Claw to pigs do not outweigh the desire to create and distribute content online.
Alali sees the criticism she receives and often chafes at it — “It can be hard because all of a sudden everyone thinks they’re the expert,” she says — while Marlin snores gently in her arms, smiling and flapping his ears every time his name is called.
“We just want to make people smile in this crazy world,” she says.
Source: www.theguardian.com
