You can't go near Facebook these days without seeing from one of your friends this group dedicated to stopping a Central American artist named Guillermo Vargas from starving a dog to death as a piece of installation art.
The viral attention the story has gotten strikes me as interesting. First, you can join the facebook group dedicated to stopping the guy. You can sign one of two online petitions (here and here) to stop the guy. The online petitions have gained at least 2 million signatures and the facebook group now has over 340,000 members. All because a puppy is involved, and we all love puppies.
I find it interesting that we think it our online civic duty to petition this artist in a country other than the United States to stop torturing animals for his own purposes. Yet, we aren't fighting to make OUR government stop torturing HUMANS for its own purposes.
Now I'm not supporting the guy, I think its a sick experiment in artwork that is really just animal cruelty. But it makes me wonder, if the Amnesty international ad Mike posted used a dog as the victim instead of a man, how fast would the online petitions grow?
UPDATE: I had thought this was an online hoax, but here is the artist's blog and apparently the act is real.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
He Starved a Dog for Art
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1 comment:
OK. First off, let's get this straight. We all agree that Humans are of a higher intelligence than dogs...yes? As a higher intelligence being than a dog, I propose to help protect the dog because he doesn't have the necessary props to get the guy to stop. He could be too weak to even fight back. Maybe it's a suicidal dog. Who knows what the reasons are for the dog not fighting back and being upset about it. The thing that I see is, that We as Human beings have chosen to look after animals because for who knows how long we have been using animals for our own good. And we've gone too far in some cases (Bats and bees dying --anyone read about it in the New York Times?). Many humans are realizing that what is happening to the eco-system is because we have damaged it because we've become greedy and selfish. The world is dying because we wanted to be comfortable rather than live amongst the rest of the world. I think many people see this as a way to say, "We need to be the Guardians and protect living creatures everywhere now, or else it not just be us suffering the consequences but we are putting innocents in danger." Animals are taking the brunt of our blindness. They can't tell us what we are doing is wrong verbally. They can only show us. And by showing us, it will have already been too late. To those who can spot it early enough, hopefully they will spread awareness to those who cannot see it as such. P.S. Visuals help greatly.
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