Sharik the dog and Stepan the cat in wartime scenes

This chapter addresses the employment of animals for the promotion of axiological content, through a comparative analysis of two case studies of narratives about heroic animals. The first case is the Polish TV series Four Tank-Men and a Dog from the 1960s and 1970s, in which one of the lead characters is a dog named Sharik, who holds the status of a member of a tank crew. The second case comes from social media and concerns the Ukrainian cat Stepan, who won first prize in the World Influencers and Bloggers Awards in the Pet Influencer category in 2022 after $10,000 was raised through his social media account to rescue animals in war-torn Ukraine. The juxtaposition of Sharik&s;s and Stepan&s;s cases highlights changes in the social understanding of values and responsibilities that have taken place with the development of consumer culture and the expansion of social media into everyday life. Alternatively, these cases can be viewed as fragments of a story about the various ways in which nonhuman animals have been involved in expressing and promoting human values.