Apparently, the FBI's Boston field office are investigating Bonsai Kitten.com on allegations of cruelty to animals. What they don't seem to realize is that Bonsai Kitten.com is a spoof web site, a parady, a joke. But I guess the people over at the FBI are so dense that if it doesn't say that it's a joke, they'll believe just about anything, no matter how absurd it appears to be.

Maybe it's the convincing details that they go into that lead so many people into falsely believing that what they're doing is real. Maybe it's statements like:

"At only a few weeks of age, a kitten's bones have not yet hardened and become osseous. The flexibility of the kitten's skeleton means that if the bones are gently warped at this early age, they can be molded into any desired shape. At Bonsai Kitten, we achieve this by placing the kitten into a rigid vessel soon after birth, and allowing the young cat to grow out its formative time entirely within this container. The kitten essentially grows into the shape of the vessel!"

Animal lovers and anti-cruelty crusaders, among others, are also up in arms and under the assumption that the web site is advocating that cats be raised in glass jars. Among them are the Humane Society of the United States and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA).

"By physically constraining the growth of a developing living thing, it can be directed to take the shape of the vessel that constrains it. Just as a topiary gardener produces bushes that take the forms of animals or any other thing, you no longer need be satisfied with a housepet having the same mundane shape as all other members of its species. With Bonsai Kitten, a world of variation awaits you, limited only by your own imagination." Statements like these don't seem to go over well with some people.

Of course animal cruelty is nothing to joke about and I am entirely against it, but to want to have the site taken offline, as desired by the national Humane Society and the ASPCA, merely because there's a slight possibility that the contents could encourage people to experiment on their own pets or that it could promote further animal abuse is absurd. Besides, their decision to publish the material, no matter how objectionable it may be, is guaranteed by the First Amendment.

Sure, there's a possibility that someone may copy or experiment with the ideas, but the same can also be said of what's shown on t.v., in the books and magazines we read, in the movies, and in the popular video games our children play, not to mention the music we listen to. Does this mean that we should start banning or destroying everything around us that may elicit bad or socially unacceptable thoughts and behaviors in us? Because if this material is to be banned on the ground that it may result in copycats, then the same should be done about all the violence and other objectionable material we see in the media since they're also liable to encourage copycat behavior. But I don't see people all up in arms over this. I don't see the FBI investigating companies such as Time Warner (now AOL-Time Warner) for producing, publishing, and broadcasting all the garbage we are exposed to on a daily basis.