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"FacebookPinterest\n\n I. Among The Beastmasters\n\nThere are simply too many cute animals, so the Beastmasters are trying to cull the herd. Jack Shepherd, the original Beastmaster, sits at a computer monitor working on a post titled \"The 50 Cutest Things That Happened This Year,\" pausing at each cute thing to gauge the reactions of the three women circled behind him. He scrolls past a video of a corgi twerking in Japan, and then a photo of an improbably, fantastically obese hedgehog named Regina. The other Beastmasters' reactions range from aww to awwwwwww. Jack clicks serenely past a capybara wearing a flannel blanket and pauses at a photograph of a gumball-sized bird perched in the valley of a spoon. \"I dunno, man,\" he asks. \"Are birds cute?\"\n\n\"I think it's really cute,\" says BuzzFeed managing editor Summer Anne Burton, whose other official designation is Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time. \"It's super tiny.\"\n\nChelsea Marshall, Beastmaster 3: The Eye of Braxus\u2014she won the job last May over hundreds of other candidates; back then, BuzzFeed was calling the position \"associate animals editor\"\u2014is more skeptical. \"I'm writing it down as 'Maybe chop,' \" she says. Sami Main, BuzzFeed intern and apprentice to the Beastmasters, is indignant: \"Oh, don't say that about birds!\"\n\nNext, they contemplate a photo of a deer nuzzling a rabbit. I am astonished. Jack is not. \"Standard interspecies,\" he says dismissively, hitting delete. After it goes live tomorrow, \"The 50 Cutest Things That Happened This Year\" will be clicked on close to a million times.\n\nBefore we go any further, I want to postulate that Jack and Summer and Chelsea and Sami are real people approximately my age, 31, and that BuzzFeed of course is a real site\u2014by one measure, the fourteenth-most-read site on the Internet\u2014and in many ways not so different from, say, GQ, in the sense that BuzzFeed and GQ both employ writers and editors who come to work daily in a newsroom and have ideas meetings and so on. So my apologies to the Beastmasters and to BuzzFeed for the following, which makes it sound a bit like I took a hot-air balloon to Laos in order to embed with four magical lambs trapped in an amusement park run by butterflies drunk on turtle tears, rather than what I actually did, which was take the subway to an office building just off Madison Square Park. But I saw what I saw.\n\nThe Beastmasters' lair is in the far left corner of BuzzFeed's offices, past a football field's worth of open-floor-plan desks. You walk a while just to get there\u2014past a room full of candy, Milky Ways and Twizzlers and Starbursts in inviting glass jars; past yellow pod chairs, massive egg-shaped recliners with li'l legs sticking out of them and whimsical labels affid: PODERDICT PODERPATCH, HARRY PODDER. The company's conference rooms are named for famous Internet cats: Maru, the Japanese-born Scottish Fold whose reputation springs from his panache while fitting himself into cardboard bos; Henri, star of a series of black-and-white French existentialist YouTube videos (sample subtitles: \"My thumbs are not opposable.... Yet I oppose everything\"), one of which was deemed by Roger Ebert to be the \"best Internet cat video ever made\"; \"I Should Buy a Boat\" Cat, about which your guess is as good as mine.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nSummer has cool librarian glasses, yellow tights, and a black suit jacket with several photos of cats pinned to its lapel; Sami, their intern, is improbably tiny, like she was born inside the Internet and was only recently raised to human size within the confines of this brightly colored office. She is wearing a red BuzzFeed sweatshirt over a T-shirt with a line drawing of a dog on it. Jack and Chelsea are boyishly and girlishly handsome, respectively; both have the kindly, innocent look of pet-owning vegetarians, perhaps because they are both vegetarians who own pets. (Jack is in fact vegan.) All four of them are super nice.\n\nJack contemplates a video of a baby otter hungrily drinking milk from a syringe and then another video of an otter dunking a basketball, and the Beastmasters decide that the milk-drinking otter is more inspiring. I'm jotting all this down, my hard-hitting observations about this bounty of otters, when Summer clears her throat and asks me a question I've been dreading: \"Are you a dog person or a cat person?\"\n\nI've been dreading this question because the answer is \"neither,\" and I wasn't sure if the Beastmasters, with their earnest and openhearted love of animals and the virtual world they have come to inhabit, would understand. It was sort of why I was here, actually\u2014to marvel at four people whose full-time job has the type of radical newness that's almost lonely, for the way it would mystify their ancestors and mine. But I'm also here to help untangle my own mystification in the face of animals, for which I have felt, in the course of my time on this planet, mostly indifference, shading occasionally toward terror. As in I'm sort of afraid of dogs?\n\nThat's basically what I stammer out, while the Beastmasters and their apprentice gaze upon me in wounded disbelief.\n\n\"Like, all of these pictures left you cold?!\" Jack asks, joking but not really joking. \"Because this is, like, the cutest shit that happened in an entire year.\"\n\n\"Do you like babies?\" Summer asks. Firmer territory here. The answer is an unequivocal yes.\n\n\"Ugh, I fucking hate babies,\" Jack says. Then he reconsiders a bit. \"Some of my favorite cute-animal pictures are animals and babies interacting, and that's cool.\"\n\n But that's as far as you go with babies? I ask.\n\n\"Babies, like, by themselves, I don't know, I think I probably have the same\u2014it's like, why? I don't get it.\"\n\n It's a mystery to you?\n\n\"Well, I have a theory that if you are an animals person, it's different?\" Summer says. \"Like, human babies, you're comparing them to other animals, and if they were an animal, they wouldn't be a very cute one. They don't have cute fur; their eyes aren't as big as some other baby animals'; they don't have cute paws.\"\n\n We're still talking about human babies, right?\n\nSummer nods, spreading her hands in a gesture of innocence. \"When you see baby animals that are hairless,\" she says, \"they're not as cute.\"\n\nA bit later, the Beastmasters will return to this same question, in the form of a proposed and quickly rejected Dolphin Week on the site\u2014another woefully hairless animal\u2014and Summer will put her finger on exactly what's wrong with babies and every other living being not lucky enough to be covered in hair.\n\n\"Sorry,\" she says. \"Nothing without fur is viral.\"\n\n\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n II. Puss Gentlemen Of Yore\n\nHere is where a more responsible reporter might write something whimsical yet definitive like: In the beginning, there were cats. And there were\u2014going back millions of years in the archaeological record, across nearly every continent you care to name. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, not far from where the museum recently staged a show of Balthus's controversially sexy paintings called Cats and Girls, you can find the bronzed heads of felines, cast by Egyptians who held the animal in such esteem that they would shave their eyebrows and go into mourning when one died. The Emperor of Japan once bestowed rank on a cat\u2014the same as bestowed on court ladies. In eighteenth-century England, so we are informed by the celebrity photographer and 1920s man-about-town Carl Van Vechten, author of the deeply endearing The Tiger in the House: A Cultural History of the Cat, \"puss gentleman\" was a derogatory term roughly equivalent to \"catamite\"; we also learn of a feline known as Major Pussman, a name that will haunt me till the end of my days.\n\nSo yeah, in the beginning, there were cats. And shortly after that, there were photos of cats\u2014the British photographer Harry Pointer built a novelty-greeting-card empire in the late nineteenth century posing cats on roller skates or at the controls of old-timey cameras\u2014and after that came the Internet, which was immediately lousy with cats and also dogs, sugar gliders and caracals, dik-diks and sloths, skateboarding dogs and socially awkward penguins. One in ten social-networking accounts reportedly \"belongs\" to an animal. YouTube currently offers about a decade's worth of dedicated cat videos. You could die, presumably alone, watching them. Maru, the Scottish Fold who goes in and out of bos, and Mishka, the Siberian husky who barks a grim, labored approximation of \"I love you,\" boast more than 600 million pageviews between them, which is 599 million more than the viewing audience of, say, Girls. Last year a GIF of Grumpy Cat, a mid breed whose feline dwarfism renders its face discontented, was the tenth-most-searched GIF on Google, after \"Twerk\" and \"Jennifer Lawrence.\" As Joyce Carol Oates posted on Twitter at some point during the writing of the above paragraph, \"I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by kitten videos.\" So cats were and shall ever be.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nWill I dent my already shaky authority here if I admit that I have no idea why this is so, why people are so drawn to photos of cats and other animals just sort of sitting there, not really doing anything? That\u2014to risk once more the horror of my new Beastmaster friends\u2014I am not only mystified but a little disdainful of this thing that most humans on this planet behold with a pure and uncomplicated joy? Do I lack love in my heart? Compassion?\n\nI was wondering this stuff aloud one afternoon in the office of Ben Smith, BuzzFeed's boyish and sleepy-eyed editor in chief. BuzzFeed and its Beastmasters are so widely read, he said, in part because they've figured out that while sports and service-y packages about jeans and even politics are all essentially niche topics, aimed at some infinitesimally small percentage of the population, animals are the great universal subject, the Esperanto of the Internet.\n\n\"Your possible audience for something about cute animals,\" Ben said, \"is the entire human race, minus the sociopaths.\"\n\n So what you're saying is, if I don't respond to the cuteness...\n\n\"Yeah, that's a problem you might run into,\" Ben said.\n\n That I'm a sociopath?\n\n\"You're a magazine writer,\" he said pityingly.\n\nOkay, so: sociopath with a job to do. I began familiarizing myself with the virtual animal kingdom, which is effectively infinite. As with Internet porn, certain star performers recur, but otherwise there is an unending supply of aspirants, one-timers, and weird new scenes from foreign countries. Certain animals go in and out of vogue\u2014\"Hedgehogs were big like a year ago,\" Summer says, but the animals of the moment are quokkas, \"these Australian things that always look like they're really happy.\" Only cats and dogs never really fade, in part because they're what people have in their own homes, and in part because, Internet-wise, cats and dogs are where it all began.\n\nWith cats, in particular\u2014historians of the animals-online form date it, more or less, to the circa 2005 rise in popularity of LOLCats, photos of various mischievous cats with various mischievous captions (\"Sup, bro?\"). After that it very quickly became a free-for-all of outsize animal celebrity and species one-upmanship. I learned about the sugar glider, the little arboreal possum who became a wildly popular blog subject a few years back, and the slow loris\u2014that tiny-bodied, huge-eyed primate, cute as a fur-covered button.\n\nOn YouTube I watched a viral video of a pair of koalas ardently fucking in the background of an Andy Roddick interview at an Australian animal sanctuary. I listened to Peter Gabriel make woeful electronic music in a duet with a bonobo. I read with some anxiety about the travails of Ikea Monkey, the shearling-coat-wearing Japanese macaque who'd become separated from his human mother in an Ontario Ikea parking lot and had since been remanded to the Story Book Farm Primate Sanctuary, where the erstwhile viral star was stripped of his man-clothes and tasked with \"learning how to be a monkey again.\"\n\nI was not unmoved. I found myself drawn in particular to animals who did things, as opposed to just sort of sitting there, demanding my love without giving anything in return. The whale who danced sensuously to mariachi music. Salsa Dog, another fine dancer. That sea otter who could dunk a basketball. All those goats who yelled like men. I lost hours, days, weeks doing this. The work affected me in small but significant ways. I said aww out loud more often than I was accustomed. The woman I live with, with her wide, guileless eyes and lonesome air, began from certain angles to resemble a slow loris.\n\n\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n III. Sloth Week\n\nThe beastmasters gather a few days before Christmas in the \"I Should Buy a Boat\" Cat conference room to plan a Sloth Week. An oil painting of a sailboat piloted by a cat hangs on one wall, a flat-screen on the other. The Beastmasters are joined by BuzzFeed senior editor Matt Stopera, a handsome bearded guy in a sweatshirt with an otter on it.\n\nThey should recruit Kristen Bell, Matt's saying, whose tearful 2012 joy-meltdown when confronted with a live sloth (a joy-meltdown that was later memorialized on The Ellen DeGeneres Show ) cemented that animal as a viral sensation. Also there should be a \"takeover\" button that BuzzFeed readers can press to turn the entire site into a kind of sloth-land. \"It would just load really slow,\" Sami adds. \"Like, sorry, sloths took over BuzzFeed this week, so everything's a little slow.\"\n\n\"We could have a countdown, like, on the front page, and the countdown could move really slowly,\" Summer says.\n\n\"We could put it up now,\" Jack jokes. \"Like: Eight months to Sloth Week.\"\n\nThe room dissolves in high-pitched laughter\u2014eee eee eee.\n\nOne joke in the BuzzFeed offices is that no one employed there can quite explain to their parents what exactly it is they do. To those parents, I would like to say: I can't entirely explain it, either, but whatever it is, these men and women are so fucking good at it. They have thought hard about who looks at what and why. Jack has done entire studies on why cats have triumphed over dogs on the Internet. (The answer involves \"path dependency,\" the fancy economics term for when one product, like VHS, conquers another equally legitimate one, like Betamax.) He can tell you with some certainty that a reader of BuzzFeed is equally inclined to click on a photo of a dog or a cat\u2014but that he or she is significantly more likely to share the photo of the cat with others. (Why? \"Totally non-data-driven theory is that dogs are trying too hard,\" Jack says.)\n\nThe Beastmasters have so thoroughly cornered the market on \"cute\" that rival sites, like The Dodo, a new venture from former Salon editor-in-chief Kerry Lauerman, have essentially had to differentiate their approaches by talking more about animal rights, or delving into the science of animal perception, or turning reportorial resources loose to locate Mally, the capuchin monkey that Justin Bieber abandoned last year in Munich. As Laura Helmuth, editor of Slate's recently launched Wild Things blog, told me: \"I had to promise from the very beginning that there would be a very low ratio of 'cute' stories to provocative, funny, goofy\u2014not cute-goofy\u2014but kind of absurd stories.\"\n\n\"Cute,\" as a discipline, belongs to the Beastmasters. They are the sommeliers of endearing animals. Ask them the difference between a household pet and an Internet star and they can tell you, precisely, the characteristics that make the latter.\n\n\"Like, if you can kind of sense some kind of personality in the animal,\" Chelsea says.\n\nSami: \"Also we act out the GIFs sometimes.\"\n\n\"I think when it inspires us to act out the GIF,\" Chelsea says, nodding. She mimes a dog rolling down a staircase.\n\n\"We have a very refined cute palate,\" Sami says.\n\nAnd then, of course, they've thought deeply about the existential questions that arise from mankind's apparent unceasing hunger for cute things, and about their role, as Beastmasters, in satisfying that hunger. \"Our empathy for animals is us at our best,\" Jack says. That's why people share instances of that empathy on the Internet\u2014because they find the self-portrait flattering. \"It's a way\u2014without narcissistically talking about yourself\u2014to be like: 'This is me,' \" Summer says. And the \"me\" is always an idealized one, full of love and compassion for that which is not as strong or as large or ostensibly intelligent as we are.\n\nThe Beastmasters have trained their whole lives for this, growing up (in Jack's case) with cats, or (in Chelsea's case) with cats and dogs, or (in Summer's case) with cats and dogs and \"parakeets and ferrets and guinea pigs and rabbits and other things.\" They long ago began making viral videos\u2014Jack, before he came to BuzzFeed, worked for PETA, where his campaign to rename fish \"sea kittens\" made it all the way to The Colbert Report. They are, in short, a team of relentlessly bright people who have dedicated their professional existence to turning the wasting of your time into a precise science. They set Sloth Week for July, maybe, and then adjourn.\n\n\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n IV. Behold, a Slow Loris\n\nI RESOLVED TO MEET a slow loris. I'd become fascinated with them. Their particular brand of cuteness\u2014small and lithe and antisocial\u2014spoke to me. Plus, the more I read about the loris, the more I was convinced that it was emblematic of an unsettling thing I'd noticed, which for lack of a better phrase I'll call the dark side of the online animal economy. The famous Internet cat Lil Bub, whose host of disabilities (no teeth, a deformed lower jaw, extra toes on each paw, osteoporosis) renders her unable to walk much. Grumpy Cat, afflicted with dwarfism, cursed with the inability to look anything but annoyed. Sir Stuffington, another famous feline, whose pirate eye patch hid a missing eye, ripped from its socket by a raccoon. Regina, the massively obese hedgehog. So many of the most popular animals online, whose \"cuteness\" was seen as superlative\u2014they were well loved by their owners, yes, but they were also maimed, damaged, freaks of nature. People looked at their pain and said awww .\n\nConsider the loris. Native to the jungles of Southeast Asia. They have fangs in their natural state and a toxic, venomous bite. They're nocturnal, don't like to be held. To watch a slow loris on YouTube\u2014the famous clip where one is being tickled, say, or the one with a little loris holding a tiny umbrella\u2014is to see an animal in distress: blinded by light, likely defanged, almost certainly poached from the jungle, where the status of the species ranges from \"vulnerable\" to \"endangered.\" The loris, in short, is not meant to be among us. Their rise as a viral animal drove a massive economy of cruelty, one that still persists\u2014just last September, an Instagram photo of Rihanna in Thailand, blithely posing with a stolen loris on her shoulder (\"Look who was talkin dirty to me!\"), led to a raid by the Thai police, who arrested the two men who'd allegedly supplied the illegal animal.\n\nI thought maybe I'd detected a hypocrisy: that behind the love of online animals\u2014the love that was supposed to show humankind in the brightest and most shining of lights\u2014lurked a kind of disregard for the animals themselves. Except, I didn't really believe that. These animals were well cared for, in reality, and BuzzFeed has long since sworn off the posting of lorises, so as not to compound their plight. It was just a faux-intellectual way of justifying my own misanthropy. The fact was, the Beastmasters were right: All of my friends were at their most lovable and endearing when they were sending me videos of a puppy howling for the first time or of a cat grappling with a printer. I looked around my own life and realized that the people I loved loved animals. Sometimes more than actual humans, as in the case of my friend Michael, author of a screed in Poetry magazine with the subtitle \"Why Cats are Better Than People.\"\n\nUnlike actual humans, \"cats never bore me,\" he replied when I wrote, asking for clarification. \"They don't have ideas about politics or religion or movies.\"\n\nI wanted to experience what my friends had experienced. I wanted to believe what the Beastmasters had told me: that to behold an animal with love in one's heart is among the noblest things a person can do. And I wanted to see what I had only seen online in real human space, to see if it would make me feel what thousands of Vines and Instagrams and YouTube videos and \"27 Dogs Who Woke Up Like This\" blog posts had failed to make me feel.\n\nSo I called the Philadelphia Zoo and asked to meet its loris. This probably goes without saying, but it was awkward, picking up the phone. I stammered out my intentions and was placed on hold. Finally someone picked up and said I could come.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nIt was the second day of the new year. I introduced myself to the receptionist, was told to sit and wait. They left me there for kind of a while. I had time to review my questions. All of them were like: But have you ever been bitten by one, though? I put away my questions. Dana, the zoo's ebullient public-relations woman, at last came and got me and led me to the nocturnal wing of the small-mammal house. There I met the loris's keeper, Stephanie. She was small and delicate and shy. She told me there were in fact two lorises here at the Philadelphia Zoo\u2014the mother, Pumpkin, and her child, Otti-ly (whose name was Otis, until Otis turned out to be a girl). They're both pygmy lorises, as small as lorises come.\n\nStephanie said without prompting that loris traffic at the zoo had spiked after the animal went viral. \"It was quite the influx of people in 2012,\" she said. People wanted them as pets. One visitor told her, with sinister confidence, that he knew where to procure one. She said she tried to explain to them the complexity of it\u2014the illegal trade, the animal's incompatibility with us, etc.\u2014but everyone's minds just blacked out on cute.\n\n\"Sometimes I get the genuine 'Oh, that's terrible,' \" Stephanie said. \"And other times I don't know that it's getting through. I think they're nodding their heads as if they're listening, and then they're still staring at the cuteness that is the loris. So that's very hard.\"\n\nShe took me back to meet the two of them. They were in separate enclosures. I met Pumpkin first. She was tiny, palm-sized, crouched on a branch in the dark. I wasn't at all prepared for her. I felt things inside me shattering. Stephanie saw it on my face. \"Again,\" she said politely, \"people are 'listening' to you as they're staring at the loris, going, OH, THAT'S SO CUTE. \" And it's true. I was basically hallucinating, there in front of Pumpkin. My stomach hurt. She had huge black eyes that grew like cartoons when you looked at them, and a little skinny tongue.\n\nStephanie held out a worm to the loris, and delicately, with a kind of dignified caution, the animal unfurled its long right arm and reached for the morsel. It was like that painting, God reaching out his hand to Adam. It sounds ridiculous, but that's really the first thing I thought of, watching Pumpkin claim her worm, her arm stretching out, then folding back in on itself.\n\nMy heart felt full and weird, even hours later.\n\n\n\n V. \"16 Cats Who Care Even Less Than You Do\"\n\n At a bar downtown, the Beastmasters are telling me how they really feel.\n\n\"I don't know if I've expressed this,\" Summer is saying about my animal-indifference confession earlier, but the way I feel about animals is kind of the way she feels about me at this moment. Or about the sentiment I expressed, anyway. This was all pre-loris. But I'd said what I'd said.\n\n\"Ever since you said that, I'm like, 'Huh. What is that? How is that possible? And what is that like\u2014to not really care that much?' \"\n\nI'd been asking all these questions about what it takes for a Beastmaster to be good at the work, about why people like to look at this stuff so much, and Summer was basically saying: Look to thyself.\n\nPoint taken. (Again.) But at the risk of not liking what I find there...\n\nThe Beastmasters have been building us a giant self-portrait. That's obvious, right? With the best and purest of intentions, I think. And also to drive traffic and make money, sure. But\u2014as Ben Smith says\u2014the two missions dovetail when \"the world we live in is one where distribution and psychology are the same thing.\"\n\nThey are holding up a very flattering mirror, basically. \"My big theory about animals on the Internet and why they're super viral,\" Jack says at the bar, is that \"the posts that we do that are about the triumph of the human spirit\u2014that are about people at their best and people rising above themselves\u2014those are the posts that do really, really well.\" Stories about animals tend to cast humans in that exact light: heroic rescuers of and advocates for those that cannot help themselves. Admirers of the pure and the unsullied and the selfless. And thus pure and unsullied and selfless ourselves.\n\n\"It's like, people want to be accepting and show that they're really open-minded,\" Summer says, chiming in. \"But it's harder actually to be that way about people than it is to be that way about animals. So it's this way of showing that you're really empathetic and human and have feelings and sympathy.\" I finally realize that that's why the most freakish and disabled animals, like Lil Bub or Sir Stuffington, the one-eyed cat, read as the most cute\u2014because their need for us flatters us. It makes us adore them more.\n\nThe Beastmasters know this. They know we are flawed, that we are constitutionally unable to appreciate that which we're supposed to appreciate. In his office, Ben cited a scene that Jonah Peretti, founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, is fond of sketching:\n\n\"Jonah has this whole line about how when you go home for Thanksgiving, like you get to the house and then the dog comes running out and there's this moment where everybody like pats the dog and everybody feels better about themselves and feels really good about their family. And then the rest of the weekend's horrible. But the best moment of it was when you were all patting the dog.\"\n\nThe Beastmasters bring us together to pat the dog.\n\nAnd as the Beastmasters have evolved, their work has gotten more sophisticated, playing on our psychology, our self-loathing, our failure in every other arena to be heroes, even to ourselves. Their mirror shows what it shows. Pulling at random from the past few weeks on the site: \"23 Animals Who Are Completely Over Their New Years Resolutions.\" \"16 Cats Who Care Even Less Than You Do.\" \"23 Animals Who Understand Exactly How You Feel Today.\" \"41 Cats Who Had a Worse Year Than You.\" \"This Sad Santa Dog Vine Will Make You Strangely Nostalgic.\" \"31 Hedgehogs Who Had a More Miserable Christmas Than You.\"\n\nNeedless to say, humans wrote those posts. Our online animal brethren will be fine. It's the rest of us\u2014sunk in nostalgia, regretting our terrible years, struggling even to care\u2014I wonder about.\n\nI was saying this stuff out loud again, in front of the woman I live with. She'd become tired of it\u2014worse than tired, in fact, after I told her about the slow-loris thing, that I thought she kind of looked like one. All this nonsense about cats. All this talk about not having love in my heart.\n\n\"Animals don't teach you that,\" she said wearily, turning back to the television, eyes cartoon-huge, her long, loris-y arms folding back in on themselves. \"It's a myth.\"\n\nzach baron (@xzachbaronx)  is GQ's staff writer."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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