YoIn a quiet neighborhood in California’s capital, residents have grown accustomed to the tantrums of a two-year-old boy. “No, Merlin!” they will hear his mother scream every time he gets tired of eating his favorite snack. “No more ice cubes!”
“We haven’t had any complaints from neighbors yet,” says Mia Alali, the mother in question. That may be because Merlin is, without a doubt, the cutest two-year-old in California. He also happens to be a pot-bellied Vietnamese pig.
A curly-tailed beauty, Merlin is something of a local celebrity. She’s lived alongside Alali, her boyfriend, and their growing menagerie of pets (rats, dogs, the occasional cow) since 2022. The family spends their days huffing and puffing at each other, fighting over fallen apples in the garden, and ordering pig-uccinos at the local Starbucks drive-thru, to the delight of millions of TikTok viewers.
TikTok is home to a host of non-traditional pets like Merlin: there are pigs galore, as well as cows, snakes, and millipedes. Meanwhile, global demand for exotic pets is On the riseand the market could become as profitable as that of cats and dogs.
Social media has helped normalize niche pets, fundamentally changing the way we view animals. And with every new pig and porcupine in the suburbs, the conceptual lines between what we once considered “wild” and “domestic” blur.
The trend raises ethical questions about our relationship with animals and our desire to keep them captive in our homes. “You hear little audio snippets and clips that are cute and touching, but they make you think less carefully about the broader implications for animals,” says Jessica Pierce, a philosopher and bioethicist.
Kate Goldie, who recently completed a PhD in pig-human relationships, says that bringing what is normally considered a farm animal into the home “blurs the boundaries of what we think of as a typical pet.” Since we know little about pigs outside of a farm context, their welfare needs may be harder to meet in a home.
Unusual pets have been a subject of fascination since long before Lord Byron supposedly… I had a bear at Cambridge UniversityBut social media risks rapidly accelerating this trend, sometimes for the better, but often for the worse.
TOLali had always wanted a pig. Two years ago, at the urging of a co-worker, she bought her Vietnamese pig for $350 and “for the next 24 hours I researched a lot“I was a little worried,” she says. The next day, she brought Merlin, who at the time weighed 15 pounds (6.8 kg), into her small apartment and trained him to do his business in the right place by keeping puppy mats inside a litter box.
Merlin was a fast learner and quickly mastered the mats. Within two days, he was accustomed to wearing a leash. Within five, he could sit, shake hands, and kiss on command. It took him just a few weeks to ask for ice cubes via “talking buttons,” a tool popularized by Bunnythe most famous shepherd-poodle mix on TikTok.
After a couple of months filming their adventures together, drinking White Claw cans with Merlin, taking him to Starbucks for a cup of ice cubes or Inside and outside For a lettuce wrap, Alali has built up a huge audience; she now has 2.3 million followers on TikTok. That has translated into a full-time livelihood thanks to Merlin products, brand partnerships, and monetized TikTok streams.
Merlin isn’t the only quirky pet that’s turning millions of heads. Take, for example, Bruce the dairy cow, who Elias Herrera Brought home to Idaho in early 2023 after spending time on his uncle’s dairy farm. (Herrera and his fans call Bruce a cow, even though he’s technically a male.)
For the past year and a half, Herrera has posted several videos a week depicting domestic life with Bruce for an audience of more than a million people. In a typical clip, Herrera cooks lunch and dinner with Bruce, the world’s worst sous-chef, while his bovine friend makes a catastrophic mess in his kitchen. Like Alali, Herrera makes a full-time living off of Bruce, either through brand partnerships or in-demand Bruce products.
Various recent studies confirm that the rise of non-traditional and exotic pets has occurred alongside social media. The United States has one of the largest markets for exotic pets and is largely unregulated. Research has found that which can be dangerous for both the pets themselves and for humans, who face the risk of contracting diseases. It also threatens biodiversity, with species such as African grey parrots on the brink of extinction, says Rosemary-Claire Collard, author of Animal Traffic: Lively Capital in the Global Exotic Pet Trade.
These criticisms have been slow to reach social media. “Because of the nature of TikTok, they are looking for a wow effect. They are looking for something more exclusive than just a hamster on the shoulder,” says Sahana Kagi, a YouTuber and owner of three sugar gliders, a type of “flying” possum.
In recent years, Kagi has moved away from content about exotic pets, as the popularity of long-form educational YouTube content was overtaken by the short, eye-catching footage of TikTok. As content about exotic animals became more mainstream and less informative, Kagi began to change his tune. “I found it really sad,” he says. “Before, people would collect guns or cars or whatever to show how cool they were; now, people collect exotic animals.”
If you overlook the cuteness, you uncover moral confusion and confusion among viewers about how to interact with non-traditional pets. For every “Good boy, Merlin!” there’s a “Why do these yuppies live with a pig in the suburbs?”
“They’re not cruelly beaten for our entertainment, but they are held captive and treated as objects for our entertainment,” Pierce says. “I think that’s an unfortunate effect of social media: it objectifies animals even more.”
As things stand, however, the ethical implications of feeding White Claw to a pig don’t outweigh the desire to create and distribute online content.
Alali sees the criticism he receives and often gets angry about it. “It can be tough, because suddenly everyone thinks they are experts,” he says, as Merlin snores softly and smiles in his arms, his ears twitching every time his name is mentioned.
“We just want to make people smile in a crazy world,” he says.