Most people would have perhaps heard the story of Guillermo Habacuc Vargas, a Costa Rican artist who is known for his work “Eres lo que lees” (“You Are What You Read”). That is an extremely profound name for his display, a starving dog.

In August 2007 he had an exhibition in a gallery of Managua (Nicaragua), he got some local street children to hunt a street dog, tied it with a short cord to one of the walls of the gallery and let it die of hunger and thirst. He asked people not to feed this dog, later the dog died in the gallery.

This is the common version of the story you will find online, now according to wikipedia, “Other than a three-hour period during which the dog was on display as part of Vargas’ exhibit, the gallery alleges the dog was not tied up, and was fed with food brought in by Vargas himself. Juanita Bermúdez, the director of the Códice Gallery, was quoted saying that the animal was fed regularly and was only tied up for three hours on one day before it escaped.”

But the previous story of Habacus starving the dog to death set off a fury on the Internet with protests taking place on blogs, photo sharing sites, youtube and online petitions to stall his performance in the Central American Biennial 2008 in Honduras. You can watch one of the videos created to spread some awareness of this issue.

However Habacuc says that every day on the streets of Costa Rica, there are stray dogs that die and require attention food, water and care from people. How is it that his little incident gets him so much of back lash from a hypocritical society. What I would like to question every one who signed this petition, is every day there are thousands of humans dying due to war, what have you done to stop it.

Everyday there are animals slaughtered for their fur, everyday thousands of woman are raped around the world and what have you done? If everyone who signed the petition spent some time lending a hand the world would already have had a lot of positivity spread. Its not that I approve of the art, but the whole message about “You Are What You Read”.

Every day you read the paper where something wrong for example a murder has taken place, by you sitting back and shifting to your normal routine makes you an accomplice as well. How much faith do you have in the system when it comes to justice, I think Habacuc gave people a nice look into their own selves, unfortunately most people let the message go by, the hypocrites make a big noise about one dead dog, how many dogs or humans have you stepped out to save after you signed that petition? “Eres lo que lees”

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Tags: Animals, Dogs, Guillermo Habacuc Vargas, Internet