The YouTuber claimed he had saved the animal from the cold – however, serious allegations have now emerged.
It sounds like one of those typical, heartwarming animal stories from the internet: a YouTuber finds a half-frozen animal, takes care of it, and lets viewers – who worry about the poor creature – follow its journey back to a healthy life.
The problem: like so much of what we see online every day, this may not be the whole truth. The American Todd Oland could be an example of this, illustrating in a disturbing way just how far some content creators are willing to go for a viral story.
YouTuber Rescues Cat From Freezing To Death
Todd Oland is a YouTuber. Well, at least he has a YouTube channel and occasionally shares updates about his life as a COVID patient trying to fight his way back to a normal routine – without a ventilator and dealing with other complications resulting from a two-month coma. His videos usually don’t get exceptionally high views. Every now and then there’s an outlier that reaches around 100,000 views, but typically they receive about 10,000 to 20,000 clicks.
One video, however, stands out as a massive exception, with more than 18 million views. In it, Oland shows a kitten that appears almost frozen stiff, which – according to him – his dogs had found in a puddle. The animal shows barely any signs of life; movement is hardly noticeable. Oland wraps it in a blanket and films as life slowly returns to the kitten. At the end of the video, he says, “Looks like these animals really do have nine lives.”
The response was correspondingly huge. In the comments, Oland was praised for his efforts and love of animals – people shared the heartwarming story, and many wanted to support him by donating to a GoFundMe campaign he had launched. In a way, it seemed like a win for everyone involved.
Doubts About The Story Emerge
Several weeks after the video went viral, doubts began to surface about the kitten rescue story. On Reddit, a user accused Todd Oland of not telling the whole truth.
In the Reddit post, the user pointed out that the photo of the rescued animal – which Oland had included at the end of his video and also shared in a community post – was, according to the image’s embedded metadata, taken in March of the previous year.
For the Redditor, this was clear evidence that Oland had fabricated the story: that the animal was actually his own to begin with, may have actually died from its injuries, and that the YouTuber was now collecting money for a cat that was already dead.
Additional theories emerged in the now-deleted thread. Some suggested that Oland had filmed the video long before and only later decided to profit from it; others speculated that the kitten really had been a stray but later died, or even that he had deliberately exposed the animal to the cold in order to stage such a clip.
Was The Cat Doomed For A Viral Moment?
What seems particularly strange is that, if events had truly unfolded the way Todd Oland described, there shouldn’t be a photo of him with the animal that is already over a year old. Unless he just happened to be using a phone set to the wrong date by an entire year, it appears the YouTuber may not have been truthful – at least on this point.
His final updates about the kitten, posted before the allegations surfaced and he took his GoFundMe page offline, also raise questions. He claimed he couldn’t care for the animal himself and had therefore given it to a neighbor. Although a proof video did show a cat, many viewers felt it was impossible to say with certainty whether it was actually the same one.
So far, Oland has not commented. Still, it seems likely that not everything happened exactly as he initially claimed. In a time when one social media scandal follows the next, and viral stories need to be ever more dramatic and emotional than the last, it’s hard to ignore the possibility that the situation may have been staged – at least in part – to gain attention.
In the end, one can only hope that the animal is doing well – and if not, that it at least did not have to suffer for long.