Image created by the authors using cat photos from the Cat dataset available on Kaggle (https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/crawford/cat-dataset). All images are publicly available and used for academic illustrative purposes.
By Haozhong Si, Fan Yu, Tien Ming Lee, and Zhongqiu Li.
We’ve all seen cat videos online. Millions of people across the globe watch, share, and comment on cat videos every day. But why are these videos so wildly popular? And what might this online popularity mean for real-life cats and the environment?
To explore these questions, we studied more than 3 million animal videos from a popular Chinese video-sharing platform called Bilibili. We analyzed over 6 million user comments and 60,000 video tags to see how people talk about animals online, especially cats. We found that cat videos tend to receive more emotional responses than videos featuring other animals. People were more likely to express affection, and even talk about what cats might be thinking or feeling. This suggests that viewers don’t just watch cats for entertainment, they treat them more as unique individuals. Interestingly, while cuteness plays a big role, it isn’t unique to cats. Pandas, for example, were often seen as even cuter. We also discovered that content creators who regularly post cat videos have a strong influence online. Their videos get more attention and generate more engagement.
Influence opens up an opportunity: by working with these influencers, conservationists could spread messages about responsible pet care, like encouraging spaying and neutering or keeping cats indoors to protect wildlife. But strong emotional bonds can also create challenges. Because people love cats, they may resist efforts to manage outdoor cat populations, even though free-ranging cats can pose serious risks to birds and other animals. Balancing this affection with ecological responsibility is key to creating better solutions for cats and the environment.
Relational Thinking 