Digital Fur

This morning I changed my Google home page theme. I’ve had Coldplay “Viva La Vida” as my theme since early this past summer and it just starting getting old. I opted for the new “theme of the day” selection knowing each new morning I’ll have a little surprise to look forward to.

As soon as I clicked “add this theme” my new iGoogle page was redesigned by Dolce & Gabbana… out with the Coldplay, in with the leopard skin. Imagine that- a fancy European designer yet again exploiting animals for profit.

It looks interesting, and though I don’t like it much I know it will be gone tomorrow. What I’m wondering though is this… how do extremist animal rights people view digital animal products?

I’ve seen leather texture files for designers, and of course all kinds of other images online. I did an image search on Google (“animal skin textures”) and got over 200K pages. What is a radical to do?

I see a whole new fundraising angle for PETA here. Imagine, hiring Chinese or Russian hackers to use Photoshop and airbrush blood on various image files at photobucket.com, shutterstock.com or istockphoto.com. Keeping tabs on celebrity blogs and sites and launching huge protests if Lindsay Lohan or Rosie O'Donnell use a zebra skin border on their blog. They can place banner ads on various sites and seek donations to help stop the gratuitous use of animals on the internet and in print. Let the cash continue to roll for PETA folks!