The latest hoax website doing the rounds is
IBuyStrays.com. I posted a
page about it in the hoaxipedia.
The site purports to be a business that buys people's unwanted pets and resells them to research labs. Animal lovers, of course, are up in arms about this.
It's pretty obvious the site is a fake. Its over-the-top tone, if nothing else, gives it away:
You can enjoy their wonderful puppy / kitten stage and then reap a cash reward for having grown such a fine specimen. Start over with a new kitten every six months! Win, Win, and Win!
The business the site describes is perfectly legal, and there are companies that do it... for now, at least. Legislation has been proposed to make this kind of practice illegal, because the companies involved in this business seem to be a pretty shady bunch who do things like acquire pets from "free-to-good-home" ads, or even steal them out of people's backyards, and then resell them to labs. Kind of like the nineteenth-century "resurrection men" who used to steal corpses from graves to supply medical labs.
Apparently the larger goal of the site is to raise awareness of the stray-animal trade and to encourage people to contact their congressmen and encourage them to pass the Pet Safety and Protection Act. For which reason, the site falls into the genre of
Modest-Proposal-style hoaxes (i.e. hoaxes that, like Jonathan Swift's
A Modest Proposal, seek to shock people by seeming to advocate outrageous ideas).
Or whoever created the site could just be hoping to make a quick buck from the ads he's running on it.
Comments
One ACTUALLY came up with this very same idea. I first thought she was doing a prank on me - but she was dead serious.
When I first told her how insane the idea sounded, she rushed into the head's office claiming I was keeping something personnal against her and was trying to prevent her from scoring well throughout the exam...
if this idea does not sound odd enough for you, wait for the follow-up :
She only dismissed the project after having calculated setting it was not worth the investment. She then wrote a paper explaining how to mak money from dead animals fur ( dead pets, car-crushed wild animals and so on )by skining them and selling refurbished dog or cat or fox fur.
Whisky Tango Foxtrot.