I came across a video on Facebook the other day that was extremely disturbing. A mother dog was sitting by a doorway with her puppy. A man raised a shoe and the mother wrapped her paw around the pup.
At first glance, it seemed kind of cute the mom protecting her young charge, but it then immediately occurred to me how awful it was. A closer look revealed how this dog was feeling. You could see the terror and defeat in her eyes and demeanor.
And I can only infer the reason she doesn't take that pup and run away as the man repeatedly raises the shoe and she cowers and wraps her paw around the pup is that doing so would result in even worse punishment.
This is a dog who has been terribly abused.
I haven't seen a lot of this kind of stuff on social media, probably because I don't respond to it. Hundreds of thousands of people do, though, and it really doesn't appear to matter to the posters of this kind of content whether the reactions are positive or negative.
It is absolutely disgusting that people treat animals badly, but presenting it as entertainment on platforms such as Facebook, Tiktok and YouTube is appalling.
Apparently, it is also rampant. So much so that International Animal Rescue (IAR) has begun a campaign to hold these platforms accountable for the content they allow to go up on their sites.
"Cruelty content ranges from the subtle to the extreme," IAR says on its website. "From wild animals kept as pets to kittens smashed or baby monkeys buried alive; from animals pitted against one another in forced fights to staged, fake “rescues” — the animals’ distress may be obvious and caused intentionally, or it may not be apparent to some viewers or content creators."
Facebook's policy is, in general, to allow photos and videos of animal abuse "for awareness." The problem is that this is not the context in which most of it is presented. And even when it is, in the realm of social media, that context is often lost on viewers.
The company will mark particularly graphic content as "disturbing" and in rare cases remove something particularly awful, but only if enough people complain about it.
Clearly what they are doing is not good enough. The only thing these companies care about is the numbers. More of us need to start complaining about it.
