User:Kevin Durant/Sandbox
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Bonsai Kitten was an experiment conducted by an MIT graduate student Dr. Michael Wong Chang in 2001.[1]
Although Bonsai Kitten itself doesn't feature extreme obscenity like Goatse, it is widely referred to as a "shock site"[2][3][4][5] though whether it truly qualifies is somewhat debatable.
Website content
It falsely claimed that visitors could shape a kitten's bones by raising the animal inside a glass jar in the form of a bonsai tree. The idea spawned after Chang saw his pet kitten crawl and sleep inside a jar and discovered that the kitten had grown by a few centimeters overnight. The kitten would later become the unfortunate subject of his experiment.
The photographs can be found in "Gallery" section, which shows the kittens at various stages of "growth," including three from their first week. A fourth image, representing an older stage, cannot be found anywhere due to graphic content warnings concerning extreme physical alterations. Visitors who want to see more of the Bonsai Kittens can email for a link to a sales page that lists live bonsai kittens and DIY kits, though none of these items are actually for sale.
The method used in Bonsai Kitten can be compared to foot binding where a person's feet change shape as they adapt to being confined in an unusually tight shoe.
Aftermath
As the website continued running, Chang staged tongue-in-cheek campus events including tutorials on cramming kittens into containers and recruitment drives for "Team Bonsai Kitten" which undesirably caused online harassment against Chinese people in response. Within one month, Humane Society of the United States pressured at least two internet service providers to drop the site, which ultimately led eleven different hosting servers to shut down the domain. Rotten.com later hosted the site in preservation in late March 2001.[6]
Users who thought the content was genuine flooded animal welfare groups with requests to investigate which even led the FBI intervening. Other advocacy groups realized it was fake but still wanted it removed out of concern it would inspire copycat behavior.[7]
References
- ↑ There are no MIT students by the name of "Dr. Michael Wong Chang"—likely a pseudonym for its webmaster.
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20080211191919/http://chronicle.com/free/2001/02/2001022101t.htm
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20050310213313/http://dispatches.azstarnet.com/joe/2001/0219-982430241.htm
- ↑ https://public.websites.umich.edu/~rsc/Humour/www.bonsaikitten.com/bkintro.html
- ↑ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bonsai-kittens/
- ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiQejxCEpgM
- ↑ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/02/10/fbi_goes_bonsai_kitten_hunting/
Links
- web.archive.org/web/20010202065200/bonsaikitten.com
- Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai_Kitten
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