(This is a repost from MySpace, in response to a bulletin sent by one of my vegan friends. I thought some people on here might have caught on to it, either through art blogs or the aforementioned networking site.)

I'm a skeptical person. However, I am also in favor of animal rights. This pairing puts me in a tight spot with this latest bulletin, which wants me to sign a petition to protest the repeat performance of a Central American presentation which involves the deliberate death by starvation of a small dog.

Firstly, I am not able to verify this, myself. It all smacks too much of the "Bonsai Kittens" outrage from a few years ago. Supposedly, this atrocity takes place in "an art gallery" without any disclosed location (actually, Managua, by other sources). I would expect at least a place name from any reasonable criticism which wished to be distinguished from that great nebulous universe of urban legend. But all of the evidence I find in favor of condemning this Guillermo "Habacuc" Vargas appears to have been written by irate reactionaries with marginal communication skills. Some of the evidence even appears to be forged, like a recently-created MySpace page in which the artist does not even know how old he is, which I found on a blog dedicated to the memory of the dog, Natividad. No one seems to be able to settle on how long the dog was alive at the show. One report I found said that the dog died a mere three hours into the exhibition, which sounds like an impossibly short time to die of thirst or even starvation. The Guardian, which appears to have broken the story, did little in the way of confirming the veracity of the dog's death, just reporting that the staging was definitely causing an outcry of disapproval.

Secondly, even if it is accurate and Mr. Vargas did allow an animal to die in the name of performance art, it doesn't put all the burden of blame on him. Remember, it was a public exhibition that many people visited. There was obviously even a photographer who got some very close shots of the dog. Thus, we know that someone was near enough that they could have loosed the rope and let the dog run away. Or maybe the dog was under armed surveillance. Who knows how galleries are run in Honduras? But how come artists are held to a different standard, in this case? I will never understand how when artists make ugly, offensive, dangerous things, they aren't even allowed the same margin of argument as cigarette companies. Can you be tricked into becoming "addicted" to the spectacle of animal abuse? It seems unlikely. Are gallery-goers somehow less morally compuncted than smokers? Possibly. Either the public is responsible for its consumer habits or it is not. I don't buy into the assumption that a bunch of art aficionados are just a part of the scenery in a shared ethical obligation argument like this. In this sense, the dog was not, "let to die" but killed, if that is indeed how the events played out.

Finally, if you are desperate to be pissed at something related to animal cruelty, why outsource? It just seems counter-productive to go digging around for third-world crumbs when the jury is still out on the David Motari video. Is this older story just riding the wake of his more recent, alleged, "puppy toss?" I'm not defending even the pretense of animal cruelty but until I get well-written and comprehensibly-sourced accusations of this nature, I probably won't be signing anything. Go ahead and call me a cynic for not wanting to sign on to every Internet Bandwagon of Justice that rolls through my inbox.

Knowing is half the battle.