[ SECRET POST #5454 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5454 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 38 secrets from Secret Submission Post #781.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[philstar22]

I 100% agree. I could totally have made this secret. I refuse to watch those videos. It is awful and mean. Pranking humans who don't want to be pranked is bad enough. But pranking animals who have no idea what is going on and who you have a responsibility to care for and are choosing to scare instead is just cruel and awful.

[hey_hey_hey]

Prank videos are low effort, unfunny bullshit.

[philstar22]

Agreed, but pranking animals is a whole lot worse than pranking animals.

[(Anonymous)]

...Huh?

[philstar22]

Sorry, wrote that at the hospital. I meant that pranking animals is worse than pranking humans (unless we're talking about kids). Animals are dependent on us and don't have the brain capacity to understand what a prank is.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't agree that cats lack understanding of pranks. If cats had camera phones, YouTube would have even more videos of cats pranking each other, humans, dogs, etc. Dogs understand pranks, too. They are intelligent animals!

[(Anonymous)]

What are you basing this on? They may be intelligent in some ways, but everything else you said is just nonsense. Intelligence in animals doesn’t really equal inherent understanding of human concepts.

[(Anonymous)]

Pranks are not solely a human thing. Humans are not the only animals that play. Dogs and cats also play, both with each other and with their humans. They chase and play-fight and stalk and hide and pounce. Being startled is part of their play and doesn’t damage them. (Generally speaking.) Yeah some of the videos of humans pranking pets are mean and go too far, but the “startled by a cucumber” ones seem harmless enough.

[(Anonymous)]

Pranks are pretty much solely a human thing. Playing and pranking are completely different things, with the only thing that could connect them being that pranking can be considered playing. I asked what you were basing “cats and dogs prank all the time” on, but you’ve only given me general playfulness being a trait that humans and animals share. That’s not what I asked, and it’s not proof that animals play pranks.

Playing a prank takes the mental capacity to plan something out, to subvert expectations, to feel a rush of joy and laughter at someone’s embarrassment and/or misery, and/or to make the person being pranked feel foolish. That is not something cats and dogs are capable of, no matter how intelligent they may generally be. They still feel playful, but that’s completely irrelevant to the fact that they can’t understand pranking. Playing pranks can be being playful, but not every form of playing is pranking. It’s a ‘not every square is a rectangle’ concept.

Now, it can be argued that some particularly intelligent animals are capable of pranking, like dolphins or apes. But that’s because their mental capacity exceeds dogs and cats in terms of being similar to humans. But because we can’t read their minds, it’s still just a guess that even dolphins and apes are indeed playing pranks. We learn and discover new things about what the actions certain animals perform or the reactions they display actually mean all the time. But no such behavior of possibly playing pranks has been displayed in dogs or cats.

I’m not trying to be rude on purpose. But you do seem to be conflating dogs and cats playing as pranking if that’s your only answer to my question of what you’re basing your first comment on. And it’s just an unfounded assumption of their behavior.

[(Anonymous)]

SA

And as another anon stated downthread, the “startled by a cucumber” prank people pull on cats is anything but harmless. Cats interpret cucumbers as snakes that snuck up on them. So they feel a spike of adrenaline and fear that kicks in their fight or flight instincts. It’s using a primal fear cats have towards legitimate predators against them, and it’s cruel and inhumane. People only think it’s funny because they know it’s just a cucumber. But that’s not an excuse. And I honestly don’t know how anyone can find their pet reacting so strongly with fear to be funny, no matter how mundane the prank may seem to them. Decent people are capable of feeling shame and regret when what they thought was a harmless prank genuinely upsets or triggers another human. But these cats don’t seem to get the same courtesy, even though they’re objectively more vulnerable than most of the adult humans that get the brunt of pranks.