The bag is out of a cat.
An artist in New Zealand is on the receiving end of a feline outcry after posting a purse for sale made from a cat with its head attached.
Claire Hobbs, who’s also a taxidermist, is asking about $1,000 for the shoulder handbag on a New Zealand-Australia retail site called Trademe.com.
“That is sick! I love animals and you are totally disrespecting them!!!” wrote one outraged viewer of the online ad.
“This is disgusting. Not the slightest bit creative or artistic,” wrote another.
A few posters had their tongues firmly in their cheeks.
“Has the cat been spayed, as I don’t need a lot of coin purses,” wrote one jokester.
“I really love your work. Do you do mother-in-laws?” posted another.
Hobbs said the cat was feral, and she found its “squashed” corpse on the side of a road, where it had been run over by a car.
She said she kept the carcass in her freezer for a while, then tanned and sculpted the hide into a handbag.
“I guess because it’s a domestic animal people get a bit funny about it. I don’t kill animals for my work,” Hobbs told the New Zealand website Stuff.
“It’s not as though I go around snuffing out animals thinking this’ll make a nice handbag.”
The Christchurch woman filed her creation under “cat art, taxidermy, fashion, art deco, purse, handbag, cat walk, catatonic, crazy, cool, purrrrrfect.”
Bidding ends Wednesday.
