My animal-friendly sister sent me an e-mail that requested of me that I add my name to the attached petition, and forward it on to everyone I knew to do my part to stop the website promoting one horrible treatment of kittens.

According to the e-mail I received, there are evil-doers at Bonsai Kitten that will stuff a kitten in a bottle, feeding it through a tube, and then sell the resulting live ornament.

As is my norm for such e-mail, I did a quick Google to make sure that my first instinct was correct; yes, it's a hoax. I was unable to look at the website to satisfy my curiosity (I look at the source of the web page to see what kind of evil it tries to sneak onto your PC) as the firewall at the office blocked the site, and my web-based re-director received a bad header from the website. This makes me hesitate to recommend the site to others, so view at your own risk.

These sites will help affirm that this is indeed a hoax:
Snopes + Wired + Pet Abuse + PETA

The actual website proclaims they are "preserving the long lost art of body modification of house pets" (or rather, from the blurb on the Google cache--firewall stopped me, remember?). That was enough to stop me from believing the site was serious.

You can't preserve a lost art...you can only revive it. You can protect an art from being lost, but you can't preserve it, unless you're trying to keep the art lost. Maybe that's what they're trying to do. Maybe they've got a poor grasp of the English language, and meant instead to "preserve a dying art."

The hoax-busters note that there isn't any real ordering information; no prices or address or the like. I'm going off the circumstantial information as I can't get to the website beyond Google's cache of their homepage.

My guess is that the site was started as a joke, with some goofy photos of cats and kittens in or behind bottles or glass--the couple of photos Google had show some pretty ordinary kittens, not deformed monsters. Not that anyone would really harmfully stick a kitten in a wine bottle, but perhaps the bottle in question doesn't have a bottom...like a mass-produced ship in a bottle--where the bottom is added after the ship. Sure, somewhere, someone mean would force a kitten in a bottle, but let's hope that's not the case here.

The site apparently has caused such an uproar that the FBI investigated the site, and prompted my caring sister to invite me to sign a petition to support the cause of stopping them. Oh, and led to my further promoting the urban legend, but sparing you the mail.