Animal videos are a popular genre on social media and online video platforms. Whose day isn’t brightened by seeing an adorable dog or cat doing something cute? But many of these videos unfortunately involve harms for the animals shown in them, according to new research published in Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science (Kühnöhl et al 2025).

The scientists did a detailed examination of 162 popular videos from Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. It’s important to note that the videos were chosen because they were popular and they seemed to show a potential risk to the dog or cat, but they did not depict animal cruelty. So the results are not representative of all animal videos on these platforms, but they do provide important information about the kinds of harms shown in these videos. And once you know about them, you’ll never look at an animal video in the same way again.

The scientists restricted their analysis to videos that showed either a dog or a cat, and in which it was possible to get a good view of their behavior so that they could analyze whether or not the animal was suffering. In more than half of the videos (53%) the scientists found that the dog or cat was at risk of injury, and in 82% of the videos the animal was showing behavioral signs of stress. Overall, the analysis found four types of videos:

When people were shown in the videos, their behavior towards the pet included what the scientists called “assault/harassment”, found in a third (33.8%) of the videos; “provocation”........

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