Pigs slurping White Claw and cows in the kitchen: Should we be worried about unusual pets going viral on TikTok? | Animals

IIn a quiet neighborhood in California's capital, residents have become accustomed to the screaming tantrums of a two-year-old. “No, Merlin!” they hear his mother scream when he has had enough of his favorite snack. “No more ice cubes!”

“We haven't had any complaints from the neighbors so far,” says Mia Alali, the mother in question. That could be because Merlin is just about the cutest two-year-old in all of California. He's also a Vietnamese potbellied pig.

Merlin, a curly-tailed beauty, is something of a local celebrity. Since 2022, he has lived with Alali, her boyfriend, and their ever-growing menagerie of pets (rats, dogs, the occasional cow). The family spends their days snorting and singing at each other, fighting over fallen apples in the garden, and asking for Pig-Uccinos at the drive-thru of their local Starbucks, to the delight of millions of TikTok viewers.

TikTok is home to a variety of non-traditional pets like Merlin: there are plenty of pigs, but also cows, snakes and millipedes. At the same time, global demand for exotic pets is increasing and the market could become as profitable as that for cats and dogs.

Social media has helped normalize niche pets and fundamentally changed the way we view animals. And with each new pig and porcupine in the suburbs, the conceptual lines between what we once considered “wild” and “tame” are blurring.

The trend raises ethical questions about our relationship with animals and our desire to keep them trapped in our homes. “You get these little soundbites and clips that are sweet and heartwarming, but they make you think less carefully about the broader impacts on animals,” says Jessica Pierce, a philosopher and bioethicist.

Kate Goldie, who recently completed her PhD on the relationship between pigs and humans, says that bringing a farm animal into the home “blurs the boundaries of what we consider a typical pet.” Because we know little about pigs outside of the farm, it may be harder to meet their welfare needs in a household.

Unusual pets have been a subject of fascination long before Lord Byron allegedly kept a bear at Cambridge University, but social media is in danger of rapidly accelerating this trend – sometimes for better, but mostly for worse.

Alali always wanted a pig. Two years ago, at the suggestion of a colleague, she bought her Vietnamese pig for $350 and “in the next 24 hours I researched a lot” she says. The next day, she brought Merlin, then weighing 15 pounds, home to her small apartment and house-trained him by hiding puppy mats in a litter box.

Merlin was a quick learner and mastered the mats quickly. Within two days, he was leash trained. Within five days, he could sit, shake hands, and kiss on command. It took just a few weeks before he could request ice cubes via “talking buttons,” a tool popularized by Bunny, TikTok's most famous German Shepherd-Poodle mix.

After a few months of filming their adventures together—drinking cans of White Claw with Merlin, taking him to Starbucks for a cup of ice cream, or to In-N-Out for a lettuce wrap—Alali had a huge audience; she now has 2.3 million TikTok followers. That has turned into a full-time food business with Merlin merchandise, brand partnerships, and monetized TikTok streams.

Merlin isn't the only quirky pet that's catching millions of eyes. Take, for example, Bruce, the dairy cow that Elias Herrera brought home to Idaho in early 2023 after spending time on his uncle's dairy farm. (Herrera and his fans call Bruce a cow, even though he's technically a male.)

For the past year and a half, Herrera has posted several videos each week showcasing his domestic life with Bruce to an audience of over a million people. In a typical clip, Herrera prepares lunch and dinner with Bruce – the world's worst sous chef – while his bovine friend makes a catastrophic mess in his kitchen. Like Alali, Herrera makes his living entirely from Bruce, whether through brand partnerships or high-demand Bruce merchandise.

Several recent studies confirm that the rise of non-traditional and exotic pets has paralleled social media. The US has one of the world's largest exotic pet markets, and it is largely unregulated. Research has found that exotic pets can be dangerous both to the animals themselves and to humans, who are at risk of disease. Biodiversity is also at risk, with species such as African grey parrots facing extinction, says Rosemary-Claire Collard, author of Animal Traffic: Lively Capital in the Global Exotic Pet Trade.

That criticism has been slow to reach social media. “Because of the nature of TikTok, you want a certain shock factor. You want something more unique than just a hamster on your shoulder,” says Sahana Kagi, a YouTuber and owner of three gliders, a type of “flying” opossum.

Kagi has moved away from exotic pet content in recent years as the popularity of YouTube's long-form educational content was overtaken by TikTok's short, immersive images. As exotic animal content became more widespread and less informative, Kagi began to change her mind. “I just found it really sad,” she says. “People used to collect guns or cars or whatever to show how cool they are; now they collect exotic animals.”

If you look past the cuteness, you can see a moral ambiguity and confusion among viewers about how to deal with non-traditional pets. Every “Good boy, Merlin!” is followed by a “Why are these yuppies living in the suburbs with a pig?”

“You know, they're not being cruelly beaten for our entertainment, but they're still being held captive and treated as objects of our entertainment,” Pierce says. “I think that's an unfortunate effect of social media – it objectifies animals even more.”

However, at this time, the ethical implications of feeding a pig White Claw do not outweigh the desire to create and distribute content online.

Alali sees the criticism she receives and is often annoyed by it. “It can be hard because suddenly everyone thinks they're an expert,” she says, as Merlin snores softly in her arms and smiles and flaps his ears whenever his name is mentioned.

“We just want to make people smile in a crazy world,” she says.