Bonsaikitten.com has been around a long time. The first time I saw it was in high school, and even then I was shocked the person who forwarded this to me was actually upset about this obvious joke about shaping kittens to jars in the tradition of Oriental art using a USDA license, a proprietary feeding tube, and some superglue to maintain sterility.
Well, PETA is not laughing. Though acknowledging this site is a joke and no harm to animals actually occured, PETA encourages people who care about animals to complain to the Internet Fraud Complaint Center of the FBI. "We are hopeful that with enough complaints filed with the FBI," PETA writes, "stressing the influence it may have on cases of actual cruelty, it will be removed permanently." So PETA hopes to use the tool the FBI uses to investigate phishing, 419 scams, and other real fraud to permanently remove a joke, someone's speech. PETA even acknowledges that the speech is entirely legal, less a baffling reference to obscenities in e-mail; I assume by "obscenities" PETA means obscene material, and not curse words or simply offensive material, or PETA itself wouldn't be getting far. If PETA really wants images of animal cruelty taken down, its website's non-fictional and non-photoshopped images of cruelty seem to be first in line. Remember CCPA? Even computer-generated child pornography is protected. So, PETA wants animal lovers to waste the FBI's time with complaints about protected speech until it eventually does something. To Bonsaikitten, not PETA.
I agree with PETA that Bonsaikitten.com is in bad taste and isn't particularly funny; luckily "First Amendment protections do not apply only to those who speak clearly, whose jokes are funny, and whose parodies succeed." Acuff-Rose. PETA's response, however, is quite funny. How can an organization that constantly depends on its First Amendment speech rights (e.g. in this case about a sad circus elephant statue) seek to use some non-existent capricious FBI power to shut down protected speech with such a pathetic legal pretense?