What WILL they think of next? A recent internet trend has found people posting videos online of them scaring their cats with - you guessed it - cucumbers. I mean, the cats really freak out. Like almost everything cats do, it’s hilarious. But, like almost everything people do, nearly giving your feline a heart attack is not a good idea.

In a recent article for National Geographic, animal experts told people to like, knock it off guys. Jill Goldman, a certified animal behaviorist, said, “If you cause stress to an animal that's probably not a good thing. If you do it for laughs it makes me question your humanity.”

Some may question Jill’s sense of humor, but she’s not alone on the subject.  John Bradshaw is a cat-behavior expert at the University of Bristol and the author of the book Cat Sense, and probably gets laid all the time. He calls the cucumber trend “despicable” and “an incitement for people to scare their cats and then invite people to laugh at them.”

Ok, no one seems to be getting the joke. Goldman kept blathering on though, explaining that since they “would not normally see cucumbers on the floor,” it was triggering the cats’ natural startle responses. Honestly, I’m not used to seeing cucumbers on the floor either. In fact, the only cucumber that ever scared me is the one I found under my mom’s bed.

Goldman also says that the cats may think that the cucumbers are actually snakes. Cold, delicious, salad snakes. “With a startle response, a cat will often try to get out of there as quickly as possible and then reassess from a distance,”  Goldman said. What a bunch of scaredy-cats, right?

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