this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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Why shouldn't it be? I've got a cat, if he got something nasty on himself and I had to bathe him I would absolutely be taking pictures of him looking ridiculous afterwards. "Deadly" here doesn’t need to mean that there was a big vat of cyanide sitting open or something, it could be as simple as the cat getting into a room with wet paint on the walls
What are we supposed to do with our big vats then?
Cats are liquid and may eventually fill your large vats if left unattended!
To be fair, this is also true of me.
You would most likely also mention why you were bathing your cat if it was such a rare and unusual occurrence.
If it wasn't a rare and unusual occurrence they probably wouldn't be surprised by what the cat looks like
The tumblr blog here also does not appear to be the original source, it's a general cute animals one, so additional context may well have been removed
"This time I remembered to take a picture of my grumpy cat after a bath."
"I honestly never noticed how grumpy my cat looks after bathing lol"
"My cat was exceptionally grumpy this time, lucky I remembered to take a picture."
Occam's razor says they regularly bathe their cat because in certain parts of the world that is what people do.
You assuming this person's habits is not the explanation that requires the fewest assumptions
it's actually funny just how many assumptions were just embedded into that "Occam's razor"
Such as?
they regularly bathe their cat
some places of the world that's what they do
they're from one of those places
they've done this before but haven't realized how much the cat hates it
they've done this before but this time the cat hated it more
they've not only done this before but also have thought about taking a picture next time
they've forgotten to do it last time
this time they remembered because they, as we all know by now, have thought about it before
I was offering possible reasons why they'd take a picture now, despite the bathing possibly not being an unusual occurrence. Speculation.
Sorry, I honestly don't understand this sentence.
Occam's razor states that the most likely explanation for something is the one that requires the fewest assumptions. Your explanation - that the cat's owner regularly bathes the cat for no good reason - requires large assumptions about the owner that there is no evidence for. It is therefore not the answer that Occam's razor leads to
It requires the assumption that the person has a cat and lives in a country where they commonly bathe cats.
Is that fewer assumptions than "there was a good reason to wash the cat"?
You've also assumed that:
"There may be more information elsewhere" is always implied or we couldn't talk about anything at all ever.
The belief that there isn't more information despite knowing we don't have the original source is the assumption
Okay. What are we talking about? I honestly don't care about the person in the OP, they may or may not be someone who bathes their cat regularly and I have nothing but this posting. How does this affect the fact that it's not the best idea to bathe cats unless there's a very good, specific reason?
Are you getting threads mixed up? The only thing I've been arguing is that there is no reason to think that the cat's owner does bathe the cat without a good cause
And I wasn't arguing against that, just that there are reasons to think the opposite as well.
We gave my cat a bath one time he came home and absolutely reeked, dunno if skunk, or if he got peed on by some predator making an example of him or what. Absolute ammonia nasty smell, terrible. He seemed completely unfazed by it because he's an idiot, maybe he's even a fetishist, I dunno, but he needed to get bathed. We got special shampoo and all that.
And despite looking like the cat in the picture on the left, he didn't look anything like the cat in the picture on the right.