Why does Reddit keep showing dead animals?
Encountering unexpected images of injured or dead animals causes intense emotional pain and anger. This makes people feel manipulated by social media feeds, leading them to hate seeing such content forced upon them.
What the numbers show
Counted from the threads quoted below. How we count
- People have been saying this in most months since September 2026.
- This comes up 12.2× more often in r/cats than across the site as a whole.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
Why does Reddit keep showing dead animals?
- 1Scrolling past the posts immediately to train the algorithmDid this help you?
- 2Filtering content using web or third-party methodsDid this help you?
- 3Leaving subreddits that allow upsetting contentDid this help you?
- 4marking posts as nsfwDid this help you?
- 5Posting video evidence on local community groups to identify the personDid this help you?
- 6Calling the police or reporting the incident to animal controlDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I’m so sick of Reddit showing me people’s dead and injured cats”source ↗
“Fuck Reddit for trying to manipulate my feeling with dead and injured animals every day!”source ↗
“One dead cat. It hurts because this was a good bevy.”source ↗
“Looking at those baby eyes open it really hurt.”source ↗
“I really hate people and would have loved to see who would do this to a baby.”source ↗
“I SWEAR whenever I open reddit I see at least one post about a dying or dead cat”source ↗
“I’m tired of scrolling on my feed and seeing all kinds of ailments in cats. I have no veterinary knowledge, and I’d bet most people don’t either, so I’m just being exposed to graphic images of cats in distress.”source ↗
“i saw this girl walking her dog while i was looking out and i saw her kick her dog (before i took the video) and i can see that the dog is so uncomfortable and looking at her scared and while they were crossing she was dragging her dog in her neck and crying, you can hear it in the video and she continued to do that after crossing, i dont know what to do 😭😭”source ↗