Looks False:
Origins: If all you want to know is whether bonsai kittens are real, you need read only the following paragraph:
Bonsai kittens are not real. Nobody is making bonsai kittens. Nobody is selling equipment to help people make bonsai kittens. The Bonsai Kitten web site is a joke, not an actual promotion for the making of bonsai kittens. Investigations by law enforcement agencies have already determined that no real cats were harmed in the creation of the pictures used on the Bonsai Kitten web site. Signing a petition to shut down the Bonsai Kitten web site will not prevent any kittens from being harmed, because no kittens were harmed in the first place.
(How could you know this? Because the process described is impossible: Animals so treated would die long before they could be "molded." Because the web site offers no way to purchase the materials advertised. Because "Bonsai Kitten" displays no actual pictures of molded kittens.)
Now, here's the rest of the sociological stuff:
"Bonsai Kitten" is a site that purports to be "dedicated to preserving the long lost [Oriental] art of body modification in housepets" (by raising them inside jars so that they remain small even when mature and their bodies take on the contours of the vessel used). It's actually a bit of fictional humor put up just before the end of the year 2000 by some MIT grad students to satirize "the human belief of nature as commodity" and to "punish the hypocritical and easily offended by upsetting them, and to amuse those who understand."
Plenty of people who didn't get the joke (or who got it but didn't find it funny) complained, so first MIT gave "Bonsai Kitten" the boot, then a commercial ISP kicked them off as well (after initially responding to protests by defending the "Bonsai Kitten" operator's right to free speech). "Bonsai Kitten" can still be viewed at various mirror sites.
The "Bonsai Kitten" web site does a reflect a very dark, disturbing trend in our society, and it has nothing to do with animal abuse. It has to do with an ever-increasing sense of entitlement which proclaims that if you don't like what someone else has to say, the best and most proper way of handling your displeasure is to force the other person to shut up. Emotions are no longer a private affair; your outrage is meaningless unless it's expressed publicly. It's pointless for you to privately scorn or simply ignore speech you don't agree with. You have the right (and therefore the duty) to use any legal means available to quash that speech, in as public as fashion as possible (since your outrage isn't validated unless everyone else knows about it) -- even if that effort includes fabricating reasons why the other person's speech is "dangerous."
The excuses given why the "Bonsai Kitten" web site poses a danger that justifies its being shut down are, to say the least, flimsy (and to say the most, absurd):
"People don't understand it's a joke"
Well, boo-hoo. It's unfortunate that every piece of satire lacking a prominent "THIS IS A JOKE" banner is subject to being misunderstood by someone, but shouldn't it be the responsibility of that "someone" to verify whether the object of his concern is real or not? If a piece of satire pushes your hot buttons (which is precisely what satire is supposed to do), you should get a free pass that entitles you to skip the "think for yourself" step and go directly to "I demand this be changed or removed" step? Should we shut down The Onion because too many people mistake its satire for real news?
"I don't find this funny at all"
Hey, I don't find "Dharma and Greg" funny at all. Which is the more appropriate way for me to handle my discontent: To lead a public campaign to have the government pull ABC's broadcasting license, or to simply not watch "Dharma and Greg"?
"Animal abuse is nothing to joke about"
Gosh, I wish someone had informed Roberto Benigni that the Holocaust was nothing to joke about before he wasted all that effort on his highly-acclaimed film "Life is Beautiful." (What were people thinking, handing that movie all sorts of awards? Didn't anyone tell them the Holocaust is nothing to joke about?)
In case that was too subtle, the point is that the "Bonsai Kitten" site isn't "about" making fun of animal abuse any more than "Life is Beautiful" was "about" making fun of the Holocaust. Those are stances held only by those who don't (or won't) read the originals as satire.
"Animals were obviously abused to produce the pictures on this site"
Unless "abused" is a typographical error for "amused," this is simply ridiculous. Oh, I'm sorry -- who could look at a photograph like the following and not be appalled at the poor little kitten's horrific expression of the unendurable abuse it's being subjected to:
A standard technique employed by every magician is presenting his audience "before" and "after" conditions and thereby tricking them into mentally filling in the gaps. That is, make the three of clubs disappear from a deck of cards and turn up across the room, and the audience assumes you somehow "transported" the card across the room; they don't always figure out they're seeing two completely different cards. Likewise, show people a picture of cat and a jar, and then a picture of a cat in a jar, and they automatically fill in the gaps and assume that cat must have been forced into the jar. That someone may have just snapped a picture of a cat who simply happened to stick its head into a jar (and then afterwards created the "before" picture to produce the illusion that the cat was put into the jar) -- or that the glass-like substance shown in the second picture isn't actually the jar seen in the first picture -- aren't possibilities to be considered by those determined to be outraged.
"Children might see this site and decide to try the same thing"
Ah, yes -- the OPC ("other people's children") Syndrome, a malady which causes adults to be unduly concerned with what "other people's children" (never their own, of course) might do. Never mind that some children mistreated animals long before there was the Internet or television or movies or comic books (or some other scapegoat du jour) to show them the way, and don't dare suggest that parents might actually bear the responsibility for teaching their children the proper respect for animals. No, if you don't like what someone else has to say, simply assert that it's a unique form of speech that might cause terrible harm and you're therefore justified in demanding it be stopped. (And don't forget to take the high road and maintain that if the speech inspires just one act of harm, it's too much, and you can thereby avoid the troublesome burden of actually providing any real evidence that the speech has caused -- or is even likely to cause -- cause any real harm.) Plenty of adults are genuinely (if mistakenly) concerned about the possibility that the "Harry Potter" series of books are encouraging children to explore the occult. Must we insist that The Onion take down their satirical article on that very same subject just because some people have unrealistic fears about this phenomenon and believe it's really happening?
When "Beavis and Butthead" was all the rage, we heard storms of protests from adults who insisted that the program encouraged children to perform acts such as mistreating animals and setting fires. Now that the show has been off the air for a while, has anyone noticed a decline in juvenile animal abuse or fire-setting? We didn't think so. The outrage over "Beavis and Butthead" never had anything to do with any real-world effect it might have had on children; the protest was about parents who didn't like the show and wanted it off the air (because, after all, it's so much easier to control the television industry than your own remote), even if that meant they had to fabricate reasons to justify their distaste.
If we're so concerned about what the "Bonsai Kitten" site might induce children to do, where are the protests over PuppyFarm.com, which certainly encourages children to grind up puppies for food. Hadn't we better yank every copy of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" off the web before children read it and start grinding up each other for food? And what about all the sites devoted to "Mike the Headless Chicken," which celebrate the gruesome circumstance of a rooster's continuing to live after having been decapitated? Mike the Headless Chicken isn't even satire; it's real! Surely this menace will encourage legions of children to start chopping the heads off chickens left and right to see if any of them survive the horrible act. Why aren't we shutting these sites down as well?
The answer is that the PuppyFarm.com site doesn't include any real pictures of puppies, "A Modest Proposal" has no illustrations at all, and headless Mike is just a chicken -- an animal we slaughter by the millions for food every day. You can write about poor, decapitated chickens forced to spend their lives without heads all you want. You can even celebrate it! But don't you dare use a cute little kitten as the object of your satire, because the protest over "Bonsai Kitten" isn't really about animal abuse at all. It's about a narrow-minded segment of society which doesn't believe the right to free speech should include speech it doesn't approve of, especially when cute, fluffy animals are involved.
The Humane Society proclaims that they share our "concern and frustration over the content of sites that promote animal suffering or otherwise glorify the exploitation of animals." Our concern is that they expend their efforts on ameliorating real animal suffering and exploitation, not fretting over satirical web sites that exist because some ISPs have the temerity to allow (in the Humane Society's words) "as much free speech as possible within the boundaries of the law." Unlike the Humane Society, we don't think the expression of free speech should depend upon the cuteness of its subject matter.
http://snopes2.com/inboxer/outrage/bonsai.htm
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