And this little piggy... was taxidermied and made into a bank.

In reaction to what is probably the most bizarre news story I’ve heard in a long time, the Winnipeg Humane Society voiced their outrage this week over an ad in the Vancouver Magazine touting the perfect holiday gift: a piggy bank fashioned out of a real piglet.

thecheeky.com

The Piglet Bank is featured on thecheeky.com with a $4,000 price tag for what they describe as “the piggy bank of all piggy banks”:

“Its a real piglet that has been taxidermied and inserted with what all piglets probably dream of as babies, a coin storage unit and a cork plug. Make your plush overpriced apartment complete with this little guy.

The piglet bank will take up to 12 months to produce from the time of order. We expect half the money up front and half when the piglet had been completed. Just so you know that we don’t actually kill the Piglets, they die of natural causes and these are the ones that we use.”

As expected, there was an immediate uproar from various animal rights groups, even a journalist with the Vancouver Sun who wrote that while there are hundreds of other everyday products made from pigs, this piggy bank “strips away the last shred of dignity from one small, sentient being whose innocence has been lost in the relentless commercialization of life.”

The curious thing about this story, however, is that I can’t find a response of any kind from the Vancouver Magazine.

With a reaction of this kind, and on a topic so sensitive, you’d think that after nearly two weeks since the gift guide was published, the magazine would have issued some sort of statement – apologizing for offending anyone, or at least explaining what their objective was in running the ad (especially since the other gifts on the guide were much more tame).

In public relations, "no comment" is not a good decision when it comes to communicating as it can get people making assumptions – in this case, about ethics – which you don’t want your audience doing.

The owners of thecheeky.com, who are no strangers to controversy, haven’t been as quiet, saying:

“Most people understand it’s a bit of a joke. We’re not harming any animals. We’re not even considering it. It’s quite ridiculous what’s happening." “It’s no different than buying a leather jacket or a leather belt, or having bacon on your BLT. We’re just adapting to a different product.”