Tag: Animal Rights

Something that continues to amaze and annoy me is how wrapped up some people can get in their ideological wars that they completley jettison any sort of common decency and dignity toward others. Yes, I can enjoy (or start) a flamewar as much as the next guy or gal, but some people seem unable to take even a step back even in the most extreme positions.

What I’m talking about is Pamela Anderson. Now I am not a big fan of Anderson’s — to put it bluntly, aside from everything else I’ve just never thought she was that attractive. Add in the lack of acting ability, extraodinarily poor choice in boyfriends/husbands, etc. and I’m just not sure how this woman ever became a household name of sorts (and no, I don’t think the obvious answer that everyone’s going to suggest explains it either).

Anyway, I normally wouldn’t write anything about Anderson except that she is an animal rights activist and an occasional spokesperson for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. I, to say the least, have a fundamental disagreement with animal rights ideologies, and the few times I’ve ever written anything about Anderson has been about her animal rights activism.

Anderson is also afflicted with Hepatitis-C and fears that the disease may killer her within a decade. Anderson is an idiot for following some herbal regimen instead of interferon treatment, and it’s annoying that she fronts for a group that is opposed to ongoing research with mice and chimpanzees that may one day lead to more effective treatments or even a cure for the 175 million Hepatitis-C sufferers worldwide.

But it’s bizarre to see some folks on mailing lists I subscribe to practically gloat over the news that she may die within ten years. (Actually, it’s rather sickening.)

If Anderson dies from Hepatitis-C that would be a tragedy, just as the 8,000-10,000 annual deaths from the disease in the United States alone is a tragedy (and, sadly, that number is likely to triple over the next 20 years if a better treatment isn’t discovered).

I just don’t understand the sort of person who could gloat over Anderson’s potentially fatal medical problems.

One of the things that fascinates me — largely because I don’t understand the process at all — is how some hoaxes and memes spread like wildfire throughout the Internet, while others just crash and burn.

I cannot understand, for example, why BonsaiKitten.Com still attracts such outrage among people almost three years after it first appeared on the web.

The first time I saw it I thought it was somewhat clever, but assumed that it is so obviously a hoax that the furor over it would soon die down. Apparently I vastly overestimated the general level of knowledge about mammalian physiology.

So as maintainer of a site about the animal rights movement I receive about 6 or 7 emails a week asking me to spread the word about this horrible site. Several times a week, people forward me one of a number of petitions against the site. For the most part I ignore these e-mails because of the odd responses I would get from people after I told them the site was a hoax — many of my correspondents simply refused to believe the site was a hoax. Look, you can see the pictures there for yourself, they would write back.

I’ve come to have a grudging admiration for whomever is actually behind the BonsaiKitten.Com site for their ability to really strike a nerve. Connie Bloom, a writer for Ohio’s The Beacon Journal, recently devoted a long column to what she calls this “disgusting work of a former student at [MIT].”

And like a lot of people, Bloom on the one hand understands why the site exists, but on the other hand, can’t help but herself in giving the author of the site what he or she was looking for. Early in her column, Bloom notes that back in 2000 BonsaiKitten.Com had to jump from provider to provider after getting kicked off various ISPs, but “the student was encouraged by all the negative attention and has continued to promote it on a series of Web hosts, one after another, citing his right to free speech.”

But she ends her column with a flourish noting that even the Humane Society of the United States recognizes that BonsaiKitten.Com is protected speech but, Bloom adds, “That doesn’t make it any less offensive or infuriating.”

Infuriating and offensive enough to devote 900 words to it in a newspaper column three years after it was obvious the site was a hoax? Again, I’ve got some grudging admiration whose rather tame satire is so successful at getting underneath people’s skin.

Source:

‘Bonsai Kittens’ in jars cause stir with pet lovers. Connie Bloom, Beacon Journal (Ohio), Feb. 15, 2003.