(written for Bite Magazine, affiliated with the Ontario College of Art & Design)

I waded into this whole thing a month before Cathy Gordon Marsh got her 8" x 8" in the National Post and Jubal Brown’s mug made all the papers again. Since the publishing of that Post article, the Editor of this here paper (and a fellow veteran of the OCAD Student Union) has fly-papered me into writing this piece. If he hadn’t, I could have forgotten about the incident, forgotten about my ethical turmoil, and remained in place on the treadmill of my mind. But, that treacle-tongued, pushy, convincing editor has made me resolve this for myself. And I thank him for it.

I was on a list that received an end-of-June e-mail originating from Ms. Gordon Marsh. It called people to action against Art System for its involvement in the torture and killing of a cat for the sake of Art: "Boycott Cat-Killer-Sympathizers!!!" the ‘subject’ line declared brazenly. I was incensed. Twice.

First, what vilely aggressive person could torture and kill a cat? How could the people with whom I had worked to establish Art System support the torture and killing of a cat? The fire was built and I was angry. I needed somewhere to direct this anger, and Ms. Gordon Marsh’s email said the buck stopped at my friends and the Gallery I had helped to build. I was stuck.

A second reading of the email made me more incensed: no real link was forged between Art System and the "Cat-Killer," beyond the fact that Art System’s Co-Directors were friends of the accused and had witnessed their friend’s bail hearing. The evidence (a videotape) warranting Powers’ arrest wasn’t found on, or filmed in, the premises. The gallery hadn’t shown, and was not scheduled to show the "art" in question.

I called some people, did a bit of research, and wrote a response to the email for everyone on the list. I used angry words, riding the rage that the original email incited. I climaxed by suggesting that skinning the perpetrators alive made as much sense as going to war against Art System, and would certainly be a more satisfying retribution for us peace-lovers. The response to this irony, and to the email as a whole, was hit-and-miss, but that’s irrelevant now: old news. Frankly, what with all the discourse on radio & in the papers, the Cat-Killer, Art System and the Boycott are old news too.

The media debate went back to the old "Is It Art?" deal, to which the papers always resort. Citing past instances where art flew in the face of propriety and justice, the ‘think-piece’ articles rephrased "Yeah, but is it Art" as many times per column-inch as possible.

What of the boycott, though? What of the vandalism done to the gallery? And what about rallying masses of angry protestors?

That last question gets skirted around all the time in the papers. It’s good news to demonize and dehumanize people on the basis of group affiliation, so we’re often reading about ‘the evil corporations’ vs. ‘the violent protestors’, ‘the workers’ vs. ‘the bosses’ and ‘the government’ vs. ‘pretty much everyone else at some time or another’. Does this sensationalist perspective add to the greater good of humanity or to a mob mentality?

The thing is, the ‘mob’ isn’t a stupid bunch of thugs. The ‘mob’ is a large number of individuals who are dissatisfied with the amount of power they are allowed to wield in their society.

What is really at issue here?

Ms. Gordon Marsh, who is (I assume) a fellow philosophically emboldened vegetarian, is angered and sickened by the torture and skinning of a cat for the purpose of art. Mr. Powers (the alleged perpetrator of the act) is angered and sickened by the torture and skinning of all animals for the purpose of food production. It seems to me that the two are not on opposite sides of the issue.

Did Mr. Powers go further than he should have in brutalizing a member of a species that our society holds dear? If he had put a pig’s head in a cow's rib cage, ringed by fish heads and chicken feet, would there have been a furor?

Hell, what if I did that?

Might this work change the way people think about meat? Can crushing an outlet for student creativity change society’s dependence on sentient animals for food? It can’t.

Ms. Gordon Marsh is partly responsible for the newspapers’ continued assault on the artist as the vanguard of intellectual and spiritual revolution. When an Artist screams for censorship, that sells papers. But Ms. Gordon Marsh could now use the platform she has seized to revolutionize the way humans think about the killing of sentient animals. What if Animal Rights organizations, Activists and Artists bonded together to educate our society?

Perhaps this whole thing could be turned around. Imagine a rally of thousands urging Ottawa to legislate a 10-year changeover period from animal to vegetable-based food production. These could be the tenets:

That wherever meat or animal product is sold, videos of slaughterhouses interspersed with scenes from movies like Babe and the Black Stallion are shown, with sound, filling the establishments with the sound of death and suffering.

That a new tax on animal products support farms in turning over to the production of vegetable-based products and foods.

That research and development be conducted into farming muscle tissue, allowing those who crave the taste and texture of meat (including house pets) to eat it without causing the end of a consciousness.

That Canada becomes the first country in the world to respect equally the lives and rights of all its sentient inhabitants.

Who cares about what is and what isn’t art when every day millions of creatures suffer because humans like club sandwiches?