From Pine View Farm

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The lady wrote a post about turning her cat into a handbag (follow the link for details*).

Not surprisingly, she received hate mail. Lots of hate mail.

So she’s turned that into a book.

I decided those threats had to be turned into a book. For almost a year, the editor Coralie Vogelaar studied the contents of my mailbox and researched the writers’ identities online. The hate mails were categorised, and in total we defined 12 variations of content and format, which became the book’s chapters. We published not only the hate mails, but also all the information we found on the Facebook profiles, Amazon wish lists, and YouTube accounts that were linked to the email addresses. The combination of the data often gave a very comprehensive picture of the “private” lives of these people. In some instances, we even found pictures of their houses on Google maps. Most of those menacing emails were sent by people who appeared quite normal: sweet-looking teenage girls, policemen, housewives, office workers. With only a few exceptions, these were not people you would expect to brawl, let alone issue a death threat.

The internet is a public place.

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*She intended some kind of statement about how we simultaneously coddle and idealize pets while also using and abusing them as ornaments and accessories or some such thing.

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