He Starved a Dog for Art

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.