In defense of cute kitten videos

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Long-time readers may have noticed — and been annoyed by — the regular appearance of a cute animal video in the “Whoa!” section of our site. If you haven’t, I recommend checking out today’s video of a kitten pile, last week’s video of a golden retriever puppy, this video of the runt of a litter of kittens who is learning to walk, these Bengal kittens playing, or these kittens grooming one another.

As the Executive Editor, I take full responsibility for this. But I also have an explanation.

Each day, the great staff here at Raw Story have to read and report on some pretty disheartening things — and some weeks are more disheartening than others. Today alone, here are 5 stories that disheartened me before 9 am:

1. Jan Brewer signed Arizona’s pregnant-before-conception law.
2. Santorum donor Foster Friess wondering if Obama’s teleprompters are “bulletproof.
3. Thousands of women in Uzbekistan are being forcibly sterilized, including via unwilling hysterectomy.
4. The mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, has his own helicopter and flies it around but can still keep public aviation authorities from knowing where he is going.
5. The Mommy-wars and Rosen-gate continue apace.

So, yeah, by about mid-morning on a Friday, I want to watch a kitten do kitten-things, or a puppy do puppy-things, at least for a couple minutes, and I don’t feel bad about that. Often, so does at least one member of our team. And we figure our readers might, too.

The news is a serious business, but we at Raw Story try not to take ourselves too seriously. Hence: kitty videos.

And your reward for reading this, of course, is another video. Here’s a kitten attacking a much larger cat — a cat fight, if you will.