Internet Finally Runs Out of Animals to Obsess Over

After countless adorable photos, GIFs, memes and viral videos, the internet has finally run out of animals to ooh, ahhh and LOL over. The last gasp of the "animals on the internet" craze came on April 1st, 2013, with the launch -- and subsequent failure -- of the "Indifferent Zorilla" meme.

The meme began when Redditor I_Love_Lamp uploaded the photo below of a zorilla, a member of the weasel family that looks like a cross between a skunk and the cat that Pepe Le Pew chased after, to /r/pics with the headline "April Fool's Day? Meh."

Despite the combination of odd-but-cute animal and the internet's preferred three letter declaration of indifference, the meme failed to take off. Subsequent memes which displayed the zorilla's lack of interest in the season finale of 'The Walking Dead' and the news that Rihanna and Chris Brown were back together only scored a handful of upvotes.

"Technically, that was the last animal that the internet had yet to discover," said Stephen Romano, a social researcher at Hofstra University. "The Web has pretty much exhausted every phylum, class and kingdom in the mammalian species."

Other experts in the area of animal-based internet distractions concur that the constant search for "the next cat" has led to a drain on worldwide supplies of animal photos.

"It's pretty grim out there," said Buzzfeed Animals editor Cristin Lee. "We tried a '10 Zorillas That Look Like Rugrats Characters' gallery and it only got 8,000 shares on Facebook. It's safe to say the internet is over furry creatures taking on human characteristics."

"There were concerns everyone was pushing it with the whole sloth thing," said Chris Mancini, author of the bestselling book 'LOL Pets: The Rise and Fall of Those Quickie Animal Books They Sell at Urban Outfitters.' "Now it looks like the zorilla was the adorable straw that broke the camel's back. Speaking of, has anyone done a Tumblr of photos of camels mid-spit? That would be hilarious."

Now that the internet is over its cute animal obsession, we can all get back to what the global system of interconnected networks was built for in the first place: playing computer chess over a modem with our pen pal in the Ukraine.