I genuinely don't know if I'm impressed or incredibly depressed that the owners of a disgruntled looking cat are turning the facade of a discontented feline into a company. Snarky types would point at this and scream "LATE STAGE CAPITALISM" or some such....
but...it's weird, to me.
Disregarding food waste, farm animals are raised for food and work to produce sustainment for society. At the minimum, their deaths help sustain our lives. This cat wasn't thought of as a monetary gain for the family until only after it became "famous", as the article states. That is when the family started showing it off for entertainment and as revenue.
Take this another way, why should the one girl complain I groped her breast on the train when there are thousands of girls being traded for sex across the world and even country? What's one girl got to complain about when others have it worse?
There are degrees of things. In this case, they are all wrong. Because A is worse than B doesn't make B better, it just makes A worse than B.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Grumpy-Cat/e/B00E952UMS/ref=dp_byline...
The owners of Kabosu, the original Doge, also let someone commercialize it, but they weren't nearly as savvy as Grumpy Cat's owner, and their mediocre Doge merchandise was on clearance racks at Hot Topic not long after it came out. Despite it not being successful, they managed to get under the skin of Doge/Dogecoin fans with trademark and copyright claims. https://www.dailydot.com/business/doge-trademark-ultra-pro/
(I wonder who that Lambda is?)
It's just...we've made it to the point of profiting off of a cat. For looking humorously pissed off by cat standards. The year she (she? I think?) came to sxsw and I saw the lines of people spilling out onto the street for people to take a selfie with said cat, I was bewildered (and also slightly disgusted, pondering how anxious and probably stressed out/tired the cat must have been to be handled and fondled all day long so her keepers could pocket some coin and notoriety)
Maybe I'm just getting old and this sort of thing doesn't impress me; not the target demographic. Not here to rain on the parade, just...the whole phenomenon is something to behold.
Or that other brand which is little more than "three stripes".
I think it was something to the effect of: "You're getting bent out of shape because a company that makes money selling sugar water had a lukewarm message about protest movements? It's PEPSI, not Sesame Street".
It's Pepsi. Not Sesame Street. If you looked at that commercial expecting a message full of deep moral conviction on the state of affairs that exists in the space between the citizenry and the constabulary, you got played, son.
We profit off of cow, chickens, etc. because we enjoy sutffing them in our mouths after torturing and slaughtering them.
Personally, I think the concern with the profit part is abstruse. You can make money from the cat while treating it well, and many harm cats for no gain at all.
Feeling despondent about the hollowness of popular culture is exactly one minute younger than popular culture itself.
What I'm feeling despondent about is the readiness with which so many people read an agenda of decay into every little thing, when there are so many things to be optimistic about. But that's probably also been going on forever.
This was a contract suit.