Article Snowball the Monster Cat
Summary: A photograph widely circulated on the internet purported to show a mutant 87-pound cat.
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| Big cats make great pets,
And make great conversation, but think of the Hairballs! (by J) Man that man is strong holding Fluffy, smiling big hate to clean that litter (by Mike M.) |
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Cordell Hauglie with “Snowball” An image of an enormous cat (approximately the size of a large dog) being held in the arms of a bearded man began circulating around the internet in early 2000. The picture immediately attracted attention—how could it not?— because it didn’t seem possible for a cat to be that large. But the chance that the cat was real couldn’t be ruled out either. Like all the best tall tales, the monster cat balanced delicately on the razor’s edge of credibility.
At first the picture stood alone without explanation, but by the time it was featured on NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and ABC’s Good Morning America, someone had written an explanatory narrative that accompanied it. According to this narrative, the image showed ‘Snowball,’ a monster cat owned by Rodger Degagne of Ottawa, Canada. Mr. Degagne had supposedly adopted Snowball’s mother (a normal-sized cat) after finding her abandoned near a Canadian nuclear lab. She later gave birth to Snowball, who proceeded to grow into the oversized, 87-pound cat which ‘Mr. Degagne’ was shown holding.
Both Snowball’s story and her picture were fake. In May 2001 Cordell Hauglie, a resident of Edmonds, Washington, came forward to admit that ‘Snowball’ was actually his daughter’s cat. The cat’s real name was ‘Jumper,’ and it only weighed twenty-one pounds.
Hauglie had created the fake image by using widely available photo manipulation software and had then e-mailed the image to a few friends as a joke, never intending that it would pass beyond those friends. But a few months later the picture had spread worldwide. Hauglie only realized what had happened when the picture started appearing on TV shows, in newspapers, and in magazines. To his amazement, he had unintentionally become an internet celebrity simply by sharing a joke with a few friends.
The story of Snowball displayed the amazing power of the internet to rapidly disseminate information in a way that sidestepped the traditional media. The image spread in a viral fashion. As computer users received it in their e-mail and forwarded it to their friends, those friends then forwarded it to a few more friends. In this way the number of people receiving it increased exponentially the more it was forwarded. Soon millions of people had seen it, even though Hauglie himself had sent it to only one or two people. By the time the print and broadcast media got wind of the story, it had already spread worldwide.
In this way Cordell Hauglie and Jumper joined the company of other accidental celebrities of the internet such as Mahir Cagri (1999) and Touristguy (2001). But the picture of Snowball also recalled a far older American tradition of tall-tale photography. Lighthearted images of giant fish, whopper grasshoppers, and oversized farm animals of all varieties have been a staple of American culture ever since novelty picture postcards first became popular around 1905. Back then photographers had to painstakingly cut and paste images together to create the trick effect. Nowadays, as Cordell Hauglie can attest, all it takes is a click of the mouse.