He Filmed It

I watched a video I didn’t want to watch. Hassan Hammoud in Lebanon put his cat in the microwave. His friend Jallad filmed it, laughing while it happened. One minute. The cat got severe burns. He posted it online.

Twitter did what Twitter does. Calls for arrest, posts about how animal abuse is where serial killers start, the whole reflexive machinery of moral outrage. Except Lebanon has no animal cruelty laws. So nothing happened to him. The cat suffered. The video went viral. The outrage died down. We all moved on.

What I can’t stop thinking about is the casual filming. Not the cruelty itself—I know people are capable of anything. It’s that he thought this was worth documenting. That his friend laughing was funny enough to capture. That he had no sense at all that this was the kind of thing the world didn’t need to see. The confidence to commit casual torture and film it and expect people to find it at least a little bit amusing.

The video made people angry for a day. The cat’s still alive, still burned, still remembering what happened inside that microwave. The two facts don’t balance out. Nothing we tweeted changed anything. Our outrage was just a noise we made at screens before moving on to the next horrible thing.