A US influencer, Sam Jones, is under fire after she posted a video of her snatching a wild baby wombat away from its mother.
I can’t help but despair at the state of social media and how clout-chasing has driven people to such animal cruelty.
Because Sam Jones is far from the first, and while her video might be obviously deplorable, a look behind many ‘funny’ animal clips reveals a sinister truth.
In Sam Jones’ case, she was filmed picking up a joey by the road and running with it to a car, while its distressed mother ran after them.
Jones’ boyfriend could be heard laughing behind the camera, saying: ‘Look at the mother, it’s chasing after her!’ while Jones admitted the joey’s mum was ‘pissed’.
Who is Sam Jones?
Sam Jones is a hunting influencer from the US, whose Instagram profile boasted 92,000 followers.
Sam, who goes by @samstrays_somewhere on the platform and TikTok calls herself an outdoor enthusiast, wildlife biologist and environmental scientist.
During her time in Australia, the influencer had been sharing snippets of her trip and the wildlife she’d seen. At time of writing, her Instagram profile has been made private, and her TikTok has been deleted.
The video ended with Jones saying ‘come here momma’ before putting the joey by the side of the road, but we never saw the two reunited.
I’m not alone in condemning her actions. Conservationists, animal rights groups, Instagram users and even Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, have all criticised Jones for the video, which she has since deleted. She’s also set her Instagram account to private.
Albanese even suggested that Jones ‘take a baby crocodile from its mother and see how you go there.’ An online petition calling for Jones to be banned from Australia has attracted more than 24,000 signatures.
These are all correct reactions, but I would like to see the same wrath directed at other influencers who mistreat animals in the name of content, likes and money.
Jones’ video showed someone taking an animal from safety and putting it into danger, but there are also many viral videos that show people moving animals from danger into safety – or so they claim.
In one video, a monkey stuck in mud is miraculously rescued and another shows a puppy tied up in a bag being set free.
These and other ‘rescue’ videos seem heroic to the untrained eye but the Social Media Animal Cruelty Coalition found that, in many of them, the animals had been deliberately harmed or left/put into dangerous situations, so an influencer could pretend to be the hero and ‘rescue’ them.
Over just 12 weeks, the campaign group’s researchers found 605 links to social media content showing staged animal ‘rescues’.
Animals were unnecessarily harmed, stressed, or exposed to danger to make the videos, all so the creators could chase a bit of online validation.
Cats, rabbits, goats, turtles, owls and hedgehogs were just some of the animals exploited in these fake rescues. Like with the wombat video, it’s not known what happened to the animals after the creators stopped filming.
But we know the creators did well out of it: those 605 posts were viewed over 500 million times, and 21% of the fake rescue creators identified by the campaigners were asking viewers for donations.
It’s not just dramatic animal ‘rescue’ videos where there’s more to it than meets the eye. Some of the ‘cute’ animal videos we coo over also have rather unpleasant backstories.
A video of a loris raising its arms each time a human tickles it was seen as playful fun but it actually showed a terrified animal raising its arms in self defence.
A frog making ‘cute’ noises was in fact crying out in fear.
A video of a dog walking on her hind legs made a lot of people laugh but she’d been unnaturally trained to walk that way.
A lot of this is obvious when you think about it but we usually aren’t thinking that critically as we scroll.
Although more than 30 countries, including Britain, have banned the use of wild animals in travelling circuses, it feels like the circus of cruelty has moved online.
Past generations didn’t stop to think that the bears and elephants that danced and played tricks under the big tops were being abused. Now, we don’t always consider the cruelty that must have gone on behind the scenes of so many social media videos, until someone like Jones comes along and shoves it in our faces.
Jones has defended her actions, insisting that she did not harm the joey at all and only held it very briefly. ‘For everyone that’s worried and unhappy, the baby was carefully held for ONE minute in total and then released back to mum,’ she wrote.
While it’s easy to be angry with Jones, before we condemn her we should look closer to home.
The video of her taking the baby wombat away from its mother was upsetting but so are videos from dairy farms, where baby calves are normally removed from their crying mothers within 36 hours of the birth, so the farmers can take the milk that’s meant for the calf.
Yet leaders of countries aren’t coming out and routinely slamming these practices. Nor do they roundly condemn the ‘cute’ animal videos that we can’t escape on social media.
What I really want to come from this Sam Jones incident, is for people to be more questioning. Don’t just speak up when someone is being obviously cruel, but pause and consider every animal video you stumble across.
Ask why this is being made. Does it seem like this person genuinely cares about these creatures? Is this video really in their best interest?
The less we engage with these creators that are actively harming innocent animals for attention, the less they’ll do it.
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