The Hamster Debate

I have a cat. My cat lives with my mother since I moved out and has had a chronic cold -including hourly sneezing, snot dangling from her nose and little kitty coughs- for years now.

No remedy could be found. My mother says she developed a cat allergy and laughs, but I can't help but wonder how happy a cat with a chronic cold can be and what my mom gets out of it. Especially when I see her running after the cat with a tissue to avoid massive snotage on the furniture.

The Dutch artist Katinka Simonse, aka Tinkebell, had similar worries with her cat Pinkeltje. Pinkeltje was a 'depressed cat', who couldn't be left at home alone. So one day Tinkebell decided to make a purse of Pinkeltje in order to be able to take her with her at all times.

What initially makes for a considerably weird, but sweet thought provoked an outcry from animal rights activists and the media. Sure she strangled Pinkeltje to death and stuffed her with her own hands, but the question Tinkebell poses is: How this is so much different from a cuddly chinchilla-fur purse bought in a shop? And how is this so much different from the commodity a pet is bought and traded as in the first place?

Ever since Tinkebell has been working on concepts that show the ambiguity and hypocrisy in our discourse around pets at home and animals in the food industry. During her project Save The Males Tinkebell offered visitors the possibility of saving 61 fuzzy little male chicks, which are normally gassed or killed in a shredder (about 31,000,000 cockerels die this way in the Netherlands every year). During the course of some fair called SALE-Something Green she had the male chicks run around in a wooden box. The cockerels that remained at the end of the event -and therefore would not be saved- Tinkebell would have put in a shredder. Publicly. As would have been the case if she wouldn't have bought the little ones in the first place.
The organizers couldn't handle or support such an extreme confrontation with the mechanisms of our everyday consumption culture, called the police and bought the remaining 51 chicks (without ever paying the bill).

Now Tinkebell got herself in trouble again with her exhibition Save The Pets (2008). Want to know more? Read it on No New Enemies.

by Maxi Meissner