What emotions do these images of animals evoke in you?
Cat,
2025
Mark Marathon
A feral cat carries the corpse of a Pink cockatoo in its jaws.
More about this image-
Bright emotions
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Not at all Extremely
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Quiet emotions
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Not at all Extremely
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Heavy emotions
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Not at all Extremely
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-
Sombre emotions
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Not at all Extremely
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Species: Cat, Felis catus
Location and habitat: Global
Conservation Status: Least Concerned (but quite concerning)
Compare yourself to others
Choose different variables below, and see the patterns of response reflected in the circle of emotion above. Your responses are the coloured wedges. Others' responses are averaged in the spider graph of lines and dots.
Creator: Mark Marathon
Date: 2025
Medium: Photography (Meme-ified)
Publisher: Central Australian Museum (plus memeification)
Copyright: Creative Commons
As this is an image of a cat on the internet, I thought it best to transform it into a meme. 24 characters later -- rendered in meme-ready Impact font -- a new 'lolcat' was spawn. Lolcat is a compound word that prefixes the feline with the acronymic abbreviation LOL (laugh out loud), a product of 1990s computer-mediated communication, specially developing through instant chat messaging and blogs. The text added in this meme references the iconography of the classic blog icanhascheezburger.com, a website that was instrumental in bringing animal-based means and lolspeak into mainstream usage, as well as proving that this could be profitable. It also features the ubiquitous 'om nom nom', a onomatopoeia of the eating sound produced by *Sesame Street's* Cookie Monster, and has since become a meme unto itself, sprayed across various media content. As such, the above image contributes to the absolutely disproportionate amount of cat content on the World Wide Web, with images and videos of domestic cats making up some of the most viewed content. This strange fact has promoted a lot of research, a veritable cottage industry of cat media studies. One example of this, published by *Computers in Human Behavior*, claimed to empirically show that visually ingesting cat media can function as 'mood management therapy', helping people to more emotionally stable lives. It concluded that "the happiness gained from viewing Internet cats can moderate the relationship between procrastination motives, guilt, and enjoyment".
The photograph under the lolcat meme-font is decidedly not a painfully cute or adorably ugly kitten, but it depicts *Felis Catus* as a fierce predator, thus giving this image a darker tone and raising ecological questions seldom considered in the mainstream catosphere. The photo was taken of a display presented in the Central Australian Museum, Alice Springs, in which a culled and taxidermied feral cat is placed along with a Pink Cockatoo as its victim. The museum is presenting this display to the public in order to raise awareness that the humble housecat is in fact, a major agent of extinction. A large scale study into cats in Australia calculated that this introduced species kills around 377 million birds per year. Feral cats are particularly ravaging in the continent's interior, hence the Centra Australian Museum trying to draw attention to this serious problem. 99% of the birds killed are native species, and cats predate on 71 of Australia's 117 threatened birds. While difficult to quantify, they might kill around 4% of Australia's land birds annually.
The meme-famous CEO of Cheezburger Network once noted that: “Cats have very expressive facial and body expressions, so they are a perfect canvas for human emotion.” If this is so, what emotions are evoked and projected onto this photograph of a taxidermied feral cat repurposed as an extinction meme?
