On Wed, 14 Jan 1998, Linda Woolverton wrote:
> In the main yours is a great page, but, considering that so many young
> children (including mine) are cat lovers bloody dead cat is a sick and
> horrible link to put in. I'm sure it must distress many kids who come
> across it by accident or think it's a joke.
> LINDA WOOLVERTON
>
Hello there, Sorry I've taken so long to answer your email, I've not been in a position to check my mail on Mono for a long while. Re 'Bloody dead cat', yes I agree that it is a distressing picture, and has caused both the original collector of the majority of the images, Kelly Hall, and Jon Wikne who runs a copy of the LAL archive in Norway some trouble, so I better try and explain the historical reasons for the picture being there.
When a lot of these images were first put on the Internet, there were no WWW servers, mainly ftp servers and a few Gophers, Kelly Hall had built up a collection of images, of cats, aircraft, etc. and put them on a WWW server about/over four years ago, there was no attempt at classification of these images, they were all just 'pictures of cats' etc.
There is/was no deliberate attempt by any of us to try and sicken or distress anyone with the image of the dead cat, at the time the images and the archive first went 'on-line', the nature of the WWW was far different, it's main users being PhD/research/computer staff at Universities, with the number of children who had access to the necessary equipment to view these pages(at the time it would have required a Sun/SGI/HP workstation running Unix and X11/Motif.) being so few, you could quite literally probably count them on the fingers of one hand.
This is no longer the case, with the availability of modems, ISP access, Windows based browsers etc and the increasing use of the Internet for all levels of education and recreation, it is going to be increasingly likely that children will come across this image and be upset by it.
I have to admit that the image upsets me, and always has, even more so now that one of my cats has gone missing, and his markings are similar to the one in the image, but how this affects me and how it affects a child coming across by accident/design are two different things. I will have to go on the assumption that as the subject matter, cats, has an appeal to a wide audience, from children to OAPs, (not just ageing Hippy Technicians) the image can no longer stay within the archive.
So with this in mind, I'll be reviewing the contents of the archive over the next few weeks, with regards to the content and accuracy of the information provided, the link to the Image of the dead cat will go sometime tonight after I send you this email, with a link in it's place to a html version of the body of my reply here in it's place explaining why it's gone.
Thanks for forcing me to have a really good think about this, and my sincerest apologies if this image has caused your children or yourself any distress.
regards
Brian.