Bonsai Kitten Virus

One computer virus that antivirus software products cannot protect against is the Bonsai Kitten virus, because it is not actually a virus. Bonsai Kitten appears in your inbox as an email chain letter that asks you to forward an animal cruelty warning to your friends. The Bonsai Kitten hoax was hatched by MIT students who put up a fake website, www.BonsaiKitten.com (no longer active), which claimed kittens could be raised in containers and that their skeletons would conform to the specific shape of the container.

Pseudo scientific journaling effectively roped the gullible into the hoax. One picture caption read: “Initial insertion, kitten was injected with 2mg equivalent dosage of Valium via Ketamine after 12-hour fasting regimen. Notice predrilled side hole for ventilation/feeding tube.” As animal lovers were sucked into the hoax, well meaning people put up websites dedicated to exposing a Japanese man who breeds and sells Bonsai Kittens. These sincere animal lovers described how the Japanese man would give his kitten victims a muscle relaxant so that their bodies would conform to the shapes of the bottles that he put them into. And then he supposedly fed the kittens through a straw.

Armies of animal lovers signed petitions and flooded the internet with email warnings in an attempt to expose Bonsai Kitten as if it were real. The only damage caused by the Bonsai Kitten "virus" was to arouse people’s anger and to flood the internet with more email than it would have carried if the hoax had never been. File Bonsai Kitten in the same place where you have filed the stories about skiing ostriches, breast-enlarging ringtones, childhood goat trauma, calls for the righteous to fast and pray for the holiness of George W. Bush and the pregnant men website. It is a cruel-minded and annoying hoax, but it is not a virus.

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