In a quiet neighborhood in California’s capital, residents have gotten used to the screaming temper tantrums of a two-year-old. “No, Merlin!” they’ll hear his mother shout whenever he’s had enough of his favorite snack. “No more ice cubes!”
“We haven’t had any complaints from the neighbors yet,” says Mia Alali, the mother in question. That might be because Merlin is just about the cutest two-year-old in California. He also happens to be a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig.
A curly-tailed beauty, Merlin is something of a local celebrity. He has lived alongside Alali, her boyfriend and their ever-expanding menagerie of pets (rats, dogs, the occasional cow) since 2022. The family spends their days snorting and singing at one another, fighting over the fallen apples in the yard and asking for pig-uccinos at their local Starbucks drive-thru, to the delight of millions of TikTok viewers.
TikTok is home to an abundance of non-traditional pets like Merlin: there are pigs aplenty, as well as cows, snakes, millipedes. Meanwhile, global demand for exotic pets is on the rise, and the market could become as profitable as that of cats and dogs.
Social media has helped to normalize niche pets, fundamentally shifting the ways in which we see animals. And with each new pig and porcupine in suburbia, the conceptual lines between what we once deemed “wild” and “tame” are smudged.
The trend raises ethical questions about our relationships with animals and our desire to keep them captive in our homes. “You get these little soundbites and clips that are cute and heartwarming, 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 bringing what’s typically considered a farm animal into the home “blurs the lines 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 more difficult to accommodate in a home.
Unusual pets have been a subject of fascination since long before Lord Byron supposedly kept a bear at Cambridge University, but social media risks rapidly accelerating this trend – sometimes for better, but usually for worse.
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Alali had always wanted a pig. Two years ago, at a co-worker’s prompting, she purchased her Vietnamese potbelly for $350 and “for the next 24 hours I researched a lot”, she says. The following day, she brought the then 15lb (6.8kg) Merlin home to her small apartment and potty-trained him by stashing puppy mats inside a litter tray.
Merlin was a quick learner and swiftly mastered the mats. Within two days, he was leash-trained. Within five, he could sit, shake hands and kiss on command. It took him mere weeks to demand ice cubes via “talking buttons”, a tool popularized by Bunny, TikTok’s best known sheepdog-poodle mix.
After a couple of months filming their adventures together – drinking cans of White Claw with Merlin, taking him to Starbucks for a cup of ice cubes or In-N-Out for a lettuce wrap – Alali developed a vast viewership; she now has 2.3 million TikTok followers. That has translated into a full-time living through Merlin merchandise, brand partnerships and monetized TikTok streams.
Merlin isn’t the only quirky pet drawing millions of eyeballs. Take, for instance, Bruce the dairy cow, who Elias Herrera brought home to Idaho at the beginning of 2023 year after spending some time at his uncle’s dairy farm. (Herrera and fans call Bruce a cow, though technically he’s male.)
For the past year and a half Herrera has posted several videos a week depicting domestic life with Bruce to an audience of over a million. In a typical clip, Herrera will prepare lunch and dinner with Bruce – the world’s worst sous-chef – while his bovine friend makes a cataclysmic mess of his kitchen. Like Alali, Herrera earns a full-time living from Bruce, whether through brand partnerships or heavily in-demand Bruce merch.
Several recent studies confirm that the rise of non-traditional and exotic pets has occurred in tandem with social media. The US has one of the world’s largest markets for exotic pets, and it’s largely unregulated. Research has found that it can be dangerous to both the pets themselves and humans, who face a risk of disease. It also threatens biodiversity, with species like African grey parrots facing near 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, you want to have a bit of a shock factor. You want something more unique than just a hamster on your shoulder,” says Sahana Kagi, a YouTuber and the owner of three sugar gliders, a kind of “flying” possum.
Kagi has transitioned away from exotic pet content in the past few years, as the popularity of YouTube’s long-form educational content was overtaken by TikTok’s short, grabby visuals. As exotic animal content became more widespread and less informative, Kagi began to change her tune. “I just found it really sad,” she says. “Before people collected guns or cars or whatever to show how cool they are; now people are collecting exotic animals.”
Squint beyond the cuteness and there’s a moral murkiness at play, and a confusion among viewers about how to interact with non-traditional pets. For every “good boy, Merlin!”, there’s a “why are these yuppies living with a pig in the suburbs?”
“You know, they’re not cruelly beaten for our entertainment, but they’re still held captive and treated as objects for our entertainment,” says Pierce. “I think that’s an unfortunate effect of social media – it further objectifies animals.”
However, as it stands, the ethical implications of feeding a pig White Claw aren’t outweighing the desire to create and distribute content online.
Alali sees the criticism she receives, and is often irked by it. “It can be tough, because suddenly everyone thinks they’re an expert,” she says, while Merlin gently snores and smiles in her arms, his ears flapping whenever his name is mentioned.
“We just want to make people smile in a crazy world,” she says.
