Animals, like many other topics—food, relationships, money, work, parenting, what have you—are fundamentally interesting to us, human beings.
Consuming animal-related content is a wonderful way to take a break, destress, and enjoy something that transcends cultural and language barriers.
What’s more, animal memes are in many ways a way to deepen or maintain your social connections.
Sending your family, friends, and coworkers some animal memes is an easy, fun, low-intensity way to show them that you care about them and that you’re thinking of them.
We personally call that ‘friendly spamming,’ but the technical term is ‘pebbling,’ named after penguins who, during courtship, look for pebbles to give to their crush as a small gift.
“Pebbling is a behaviour practised by Gentoo penguins who present pebbles to desired mates as tokens of affection. Our research observes a similar behaviour in humans interacting on social media,” Professor Ghalia Shamayleh, an assistant professor in the Marketing Department at ESSEC Business School, who led a recent study about pet-based social media accounts, told BBC Science Focus.
Shamayleh explained that the images, videos, and posts we share online are like pebbles to a penguin. “We share them with our loved ones as a token of affection, to reinforce our relationships.”
According to the study, content creators “imbue their love, joy and amusement into their social media posts.”
As per BBC Science Focus, the study’s authors found that people used pet-related images and videos to draw on shared experiences when sending them to loved ones. They were, essentially, recalling their shared history and reaffirming it through the content.
In other words, people tend to put quite a bit of thought into what they share with their loved ones and friends. There’s a level of behind-the-scenes content personalization happening that might not seem obvious at first glance.
In the meantime, the Wildlife Conservation Network emphasizes that the connection between human beings and animals runs deep. On the one hand, you have the “deeply-engrained psychological throwback to the times when the vast majority of human civilization thrived alongside animals.”
On the other hand, we might love them “because we instinctively know that coexistence with animals is good for us – borne out by the multitudes of studies showing the emotional and physical health benefits of companion animals.”
