Meme Week: Animal emotions

I did an experiment. Which was a bit scary, because the outcome depended on you…! Or your fellow readers, who might have stumbled on this page before you.

So, I was a bit prepared that the whole project it might implode, if nobody joined. Luckily, I had just ordered some new spring bulbs, so I could go outside and do some planting instead, if things didn’t pan out as I imagined.

I had a plan B, as it were.

And now my garden is in rather a sorry state… because this project did get a lot of attention! It was really fun and engaging, not to mention important, and it reached thousands of people – getting the impact I think that this topic deserves..!

I called it Meme Week.

Meme Week took place on my Facebook page.

During seven days,  I published 4 Wannabe Memes about how emotions in animals impact their behaviour, learning and wellbeing. I also did daily live broadcasts discussing why I thought those 28 Wannabe Memes are important. Three of the Meme Candidates were contributed by you, the viewers!

What’s Memes again? They’re ideas that spread from person to person. In this new technological environment with Social Media, they often become viral, spreading exponentially.

What about the experiment, then? Well, I called them Wannabe Memes, because likely, many of them were new to you. Some of them resonated with you, and some didn’t. So, you shared and liked the ones that appealed to you, and just ignored the ones that didn’t.

Perhaps, if we’re lucky, one or two may still take off and become viral…! So, together, we can create a mass movement that can really help animals and their people! As I wrote about in this blog post, combining the power of social media with inherently viral memes could have a huge impact on animal welfare. In other words, although the formal experiment is over, the wannabe memes are still there to be shared!

If you want the E-book that I published once the experiment was over and we had a winner, click the button “Let’s see that E-book” below and you’ll get it!

PS.  The formal part of the experiment was finding The Winning Meme: it was  the one that has been shared/liked the most per viewer in the 2 weeks after it was published. Hint: it wasn’t the same! One was liked the most, the other was shared..!

PPS. You may think I was joking about those spring bulbs. Nope. I actually had time for both a fun and engaging Meme Week – and getting mud on my fingers, although I didn’t have time to mow the lawn. Gardening is one of my favourite pastimes – as you’ll see here.

PPPS. A couple of years after writing this blog post, I re-published a set of Animal Emotion- related memes, as well as some new ones, on Facebook, and discussed them in a little bit more detail. Find the update here.