Feature image belongs to Wilson Afonso
Cats are cute, famous and everywhere. You can see them by the window of your house or in one of the windows of your pc, but you surely will see at least one cat per day, mostly doing exactly what cats do – namely, some nonsensical thing.
Whether cats’ actions are intentional or not it doesn’t really matter because they’ve built an empire anyway. Proof of their worldwide fame was cemented in a commercial released by German supermarket Netto, which decided to use cats as its stars. And of course, it went viral (for weird reasons).
The video features cats busy grocery shopping in a cat supermarket (even the cashier is a cat). All the cats used for the commercial are already famous on the web – for instance, the cat that is scared of cucumbers, the “No, No, No” cat, or the “OMG Cat”. Were you able to spot these feline superstars in the video?
However, this is not the only homage to cats these days; felines have their own wine! Fancy, isn’t it? Apollo Peak just released two versions: one is the Pinot Meow, the other is the Moscato. Get it? The price of a bottle is around US$11 and the feline-friendly wine is made with beets, not grapes. But those are not the only cat wines available – Japanese company B&H has Nyan Nyan Nouveau which retails online at ¥410.
But let’s take a minute to see when and why we have arrived at this – let’s try to understand what’s behind this cat phenomenon.
To answer to these questions, we should ask ourselves “what do we like about cats?”
Well, cats are cute. Maybe this is the first thing that comes to mind. Yes, they are cute, but there is something more. The thing is that cats can be extremely funny and before the invention of social media and Youtube, frankly nobody was expecting it. Before the feline digital era, cat haters (and maybe even cat owners) used to think cats spent their days sleeping and looking at you with their superior and slightly bored expressions.
And that’s completely true. There are plenty of cats who are a**holes (like this one):
However, cats don’t spend the entire day being evil to humans; it can be hilarious when they discover they’re not so nimble, or get caught doing things.
Apparently, looking at cats online is pretty addictive. For instance, in 2013 a British tech employee got fired when his company found out that he outsourced his job while he was spending his workdays searching for cat pictures online.
Try searching for cat videos on YouTube, you will spend more time than you’d expect watching cats do things. We can almost guarantee it. Here’s one to help get you started:
