Animal Lovers Outraged at Cat Tattoo
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Comstock/Thinkstock(MOSCOW) — Hundreds of animal lovers have expressed outrage after a video surfaced of a Russian tattoo artist inking a large tattoo across his hairless cat’s chest.
Timur Rimut, a 24-year-old man from Tatarsan, a city near Moscow, tattooed a necklace-like design, with cursive script and a large diamond-shaped pendant, on his Spynx cat while the animal was placed under anesthetic. It’s similar to a tattoo the artist sports across his own chest.
But while the artist probably meant to tattoo the words “Carpe Diem,” which means “seize the day” in Latin, on the cat, a closer look at the video posted on YouTube shows he might have accidentally spelled it “Carpe Deem.”
In the video, Rimut appears to have first drawn the design on the cat’s chest in blue ink. Then a woman stretched the cat out on a table and administered an anesthetic injection to its leg as Rimut got the tattoo needle prepared. Once the cat was sedated, the artist went to work, pressing the buzzing tattoo needle into the cat’s bare skin.
In a statement to ABCNews.com, Wayne Pacelle, the president of the Humane Society of the United States called the act ”clearly uncessary and inhumane.”
“Tattooing a cat for vanity’s sake is a frivolous practice that has a very real risk of causing needless suffering and dangerous side effects. Animals don’t choose to subject themselves to painful procedures for appearance’s sake, and we consider tattooing an animal for aesthetic reasons to be clearly unnecessary and inhumane,” the statement said.
The video, posted by the Russian news outlet PROKazan, has more than 106,000 hits on Youtube, at last count and more than 200 people have expressed their anger through posted comments.
“Thats horrible! The cat can’t speak for himself, it is the same as a father tattooing his baby. He can love his cat but that’s stupid and cruel,” said one user with the handle MissSiul.
“Someone should take that poor cat away from him, he doesn’t deserve it,” said AndreCrow.
NewLifestyleMentor posted: “This is the ultimate in animal cruelty. I can’t understand how an animal owner could do this to their pet. Totally sickening!”
However, others argued that the tattoo artist did it out of love, not to be cruel.
“It doesn’t seem to be suffering much, judging by the pictures. … I’m sure he loves his cat. And I’ve seen way more cruel things done to animals,” wrote the user with the handle douvil.
This isn’t the first instance of a cat being tattooed, or receiving what’s called a “cattoo,” in Russia. In 2009, Oksana Popova of Moscow had her cat’s chest tattooed with an image of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen.
“We live in interesting time and this is a tattoo for such times,” she told Russia news channel RT at the time.
Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio