Ian Morris

Monday 28 July 2008, 12:31pm

LOLcats: Very effective PR for felines

I never used to like cats: I'm a dog lover. We had a lovely golden retriever when I was growing up and nothing will stop me from thinking dogs are the best pets in the world. I've always treated cats with suspicion, probably because of their murderous proclivities. It's reported that they kill as many as 300 million birds and other small mammals each year in the UK -- a prolific level of murder for animals that are fed nice pellets twice a day.

But recently I've had a change of heart. One of the reasons is that our next-door neighbour has a beautiful pair of cats called Julio and Brenda, who come and see us and run around in the park behind our house and brighten my day with their antics. I should also point out that they have bells on their collars, which rather hampers their attempts at genocide.

Brenda and Julio, diminishing my hatred of felines since 2007

The biggest reason for my feline conversion, however, can be directly attributed to LOLcats. When Nate and Nick spent five minutes each morning laughing at this peculiar meme, I was initially annoyed that such a ludicrous thing could amuse anyone. My friend Martin summed this up beautifully: "Why would anyone want to look at that?" I couldn't give him any reasonable answer.

But as time has gone on, I've been finding LOLcats more and more amusing. And now I too have a terrible addiction, and each morning I lol along with my addled colleagues at the latest captioned cat pics. What I'm saying here is that icanhascheezburger.com has rewired my brain into thinking that cats are nothing but furry, petite, misunderstood people with poor grammar. Amazing what the Internets can do to you.

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