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Bonsai kittens

plindboe

Graduate Poster
plindboe
Joined
Apr 4, 2003
Messages
1,246
From a chain letter:

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To anyone with love and respect for life: In New York there is a Japanese who sells bonsai-kittens". Sounds like fun huh? NOT! These animals are squeezed into a bottle. Their urine and feces are removed through probes.
They feed them with a kind of tube. They feed them chemicals to keep their bones soft and flexible so the kittens grow into the shape of the bottle. The animals will stay their as long as they live. They can't walk or move or wash themselves. Bonsai-kittens are becoming a fashion in New York and Asia.

See this horror at: http://www.bonsaikitten.com

Please sign this email in protest against these tortures. If you receive an email with over 500 names, please send a copy to: anacheca@hotmail.com From there this protest will be sent to USA and Mexican animal protection organizations.
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Just saw it posted on a danish animal forum today by a very concerned and appaled individual. Sure would like to get me one of those bonzai kittens. I'd prefer a bonzai puppy though.
 
I did the same thing, but I used a Pepsi box.

banzai002mediumwebview2iv.jpg


Did you post the link to Snopes on the animal forum?
http://www.snopes.com/critters/crusader/bonsai.asp
 
Soooooo old! This is older than the very internet itself. There are cave paintings showing bonsai kittens next to the words "ha ha, Ug, gotcha. Love Grug."
 
Bonsai Kittens are indeed ooooold. I still get chain letters from people trying to stop it, though.
 
Congratulations, you've discovered the oldest hoax on the internet.

The FBI fell for it and tried to shut down the site, until it was finally explained to them. They must have missed the impossible Klein Bottle Kitty and the e-mails about rectilinear cats...
 
BAck in 1980 a Japanese cartoonist (now, it seems, more noted as a manga artist) named Hideo Takeda put out a book of drawings called Bonsai your Pet, which I suspect was the seed of the bonsai kitten idea, though it might be a coincidence. The pet in this case is a chick taped back into its egg. Anyway, should you run across this book (Dial Press paperback), I heartily recommend it.
 
(sulks)
They're not real?
But I want a bonsai kitten! They sound cute.
 
A couple years ago, someone on one of my email lists sent around a distressed message similar to this one -- on and on about how we all need to write to Congress to stop the Bonsai Kitty guy.

I posted back that it was all a hoax and provided the Snopes link along with a few others (I think there was a Wired News article that also debunked it). One would think that this evidence, would be enough to calm someone down, but in this case, it had the opposite effect.

She replied to me with an absolutely frothing message saying that she once worked in an animal shelter and saw firsthand the cruel and horrible things that some people do to animals. Therefore Bonsai Kitty was real. She didn't really go into any detail about how she connected these two pieces together, but it occurred to me that this didn't matter. In a really strange way, she needed Bonsai Kitty to be real so she would have more evidence that some people do bad things to animals.
 
Several years ago the Veterinary Times published a shocked article about the horrors of the bonsai kitten. I laughed quite a lot and waited. It took two weeks for the shamefaced "I was had" to appear.

Rolfe.
 
I related this on another site:

"I have a rather... 'bold' laugh. Slightly cackly.

When I suppress it, I start to cry. I hold the laugh in, but tears go instead.

The last time this happened, I had a student doing a speech to the class.

Topic was cultural icons. This particular student hailed from Malaysia, was of Chinese/Malay heritage.

Choosing to be a 'little different', she decided to do hers on 'bonsai kittens'. She knew they were fake but decided to play it comedically 'straight' and bring in some little bonsai trees, explain their function and tradition and then show the fake pics of the kittens in the jars and some nice jars and 'instruments' and explain how a 'bonsai kitten' could be made.

I knew that it was a hoax. The rest of the class didn't.

She stood at the front of the room, 'earnestly' presenting this radical notion of preserving one's kitten with the 'ancient oriental art' and showing 'authentic' kitten ramming equipment (she got some tongs and a meat tenderiser from the kitchen)....

I couldn't laugh aloud. It would have wreaked her joke. And my laugh would have distracted from the report. So I watched, tears streaming down my face, hiccuping now and then with the effort to not laugh.

The rest of the class were horrified. Here was this monsterous girl! Demonstrating this hideous art of mutilating kittens! And the teacher was in tears! She must be so distressed! We all know that she loves cats!!

:D

Anyway, after five or so minutes of report, she quickly cut it a little short because she noticed my tears and SHE thought I was upset! We sorted it out in the end, but since then I make sure ahead of time if someone is going to get 'creative' in speeches and thus I'm better prepared to hide my reactions." :)
 
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