Why do We Love Fat Cats but Discriminate Against People?
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There are some people who have perceived a difference in treatment between overweight cats and overweight people. To be exact, said individuals find it perplexing that overweight cats are treated with love whereas overweight people are treated with scorn or worse. Something that bothers them to say the least.
Why Do We Love Overweight Cats?
For starters, it is important to note that the love for overweight cats as well as other overweight animals is by no means universal. Those who are unconvinced should look no further than the wide range of products and services meant to help interested individuals slim down their pets that can be found out there. Furthermore, while it is very easy for most people to tell when someone has crossed the line from being a bit plump to being so overweight that it is bad for their personal health, it seems reasonable to say that fewer people can manage to same when it comes to cat. Due to this, interested individuals might not even realize that they are looking at an extremely overweight cat unless someone chooses to tell them. Finally, there are some people who are more motivated by a morbid sense of curiosity than anything else, which should come as no surprise to anyone considering just how fond we can be of gawking at the scandalous as well as other things that violate what we consider to be the norms of our society.
Having said that, there are various potential reasons why people might love overweight cats in spite of them being overweight cats. For example, one of the characteristics that makes something seem cute to us is a rounded, soft-seeming shape. Since overweight cats tend to be rounder and softer-seeming than their slim counterparts, it is possible that some people see them as being cuter. Likewise, it should be mentioned that some people are willing to show unfamiliar animals their best sides in a way that they aren’t willing to show unfamiliar people. This is because it is very common for people to see cats, dogs, and other pet animals as being innocents. This is pretty funny considering that many of them are quite good at manipulating us in order to get what they want, which should be familiar to anyone who has ever been guilted by puppy dog eyes into feeding their dog something that they shouldn’t be eating. Regardless, the important part is that since we tend to see cats, dogs, and other pet animals as being innocent, most of us are willing to treat them with a degree of kindness that most of us hesitate to show to unfamiliar people.
Why Do We Discriminate Against Overweight People?
As for why people discriminated against overweight people, there are a lot of people who would claim that it is a matter of wanting overweight people to care more about their personal health. However, while there might be some people out there who are motivated by real concern and consideration, the behavior suggests that other motivations are at work as well. Something that should come as no surprise considering what other characteristics are associated with being overweight. Chances are good that interested individuals have heard something about a plumper figure being seen as being more beautiful in pre-modern times. There is some truth to this. However, interested individuals should be careful about going overboard with this particular fact as some people have been known to do so.
In any case, some pre-modern cultures saw a plumper figures as being more beautiful because it was a show of status. Essentially, a plumper figure suggested that someone had regular access to good food, which was much, much rarer in the past than in the present. After all, most people produced their own food through farming, which would have been supplemented with a small number of secondary sources. As such, if either bad weather or some other problem hit the region, that could ruin the crops for an entire season within a very short period of time. The elite could ride out such incidents through their wealth. In contrast, the rest of pre-modern societies would have a much harder time, which would have a corresponding effect on their waistlines. When times were particularly bad, it wasn’t uncommon for entire families to pull up their roots in preference for fleeing to other places that either had better access to food or were believed to have better access to food in spite of the huge uncertainties that were inherent to such choices.
Nowadays, the situation has reversed with the result that being overweight is seen as a product of poverty. Basically, most people have very busy schedules that happen to be packed with very sedentary activities. As a result, remaining in good shape takes up a considerable amount of time as well as money in a lot of cases. On top of that, poorer people tend to consume more prepackaged foods containing large amounts of fats, salts, and sugars, particularly if they happen to live in places with very poor access to supermarkets as well as other retailers that sell fresh vegetables and other nutritious foods. Even worse, even when poorer people do have convenient access to these things, they are still hindered by the fact that cooking healthy uses up a lot of time as well.
Besides this, it should be mentioned that there are a lot of people out there who subscribe to the just world fallacy, which can be summed up as the idea that good actions will always be rewarded and bad actions will always be punished. This is problematic because said individuals can come to believe that poor people are immoral because they must have done something to deserve their poverty, which strips out a lot of the nuance that exists in the real world to say the least. For example, some people are born with serious health problems that will force them to pay considerable sums of money on a regular basis just to keep themselves alive. Likewise, some people are born into circumstances that provide them with fewer opportunities than others, meaning that they could very well get poorer results even if they are actually putting in more effort than their luckier counterparts. Unfortunately, it isn’t much of a jump for people to combine these two assumptions about the world to produce the conclusion that overweight people are bad people, thus making them justifiable targets in the eyes of many individuals.
image sources
- Obese Cat: © Shutterstock