It is the new trend on the web, pictures and videos of cute sleepy pets which just cannot stay awake. There are just tons of them in popular video websites, and specific blogs appears every day. The most organized allow users to cast their vote to elect “the sleepiest of them all.”

In the days the new Obama administration shuts down Guantanamo, the same people approving this measure may go to the web and take a moment to laugh at the effects of the same methods applied in the infamous prison. Sleep deprivation, forced drug consumption, various other harassing, physical and mental. Even if most of the users think they are just watching half asleep cute pets, what they are really watching are the effects of sleep deprivation, at least.

Kittens forced to stay awake for days, continuously poked by at least three humans doing turns. Dog puppies so clearly drugged that risk to drown in their own water bowl. Little polar bears left in starvation to have them dreaming about food and make funny cries. And the competition makes all worse: hard-hearted pet owners fall in a spiral of violence just to catch their animals with a dangling head, almost closed eyes and a drooling mouth. All for the show, all for the fun.

“It’s the worst thing I have seen since Bonsai-Kitten.com” — tells us Licia Colò, Italian animal rights defender, renowned also for starting and winning a trial to close the miniature-cats website — “all those cute little puppies, all tortured just as if they weren’t already the prettiest thing on earth! We are organizing a protest against YouTube — we don’t want censorship, we only want to defend the rights of those little balls of fur. And I don’t see why they should not listen to us: they blocked all breast-feeding videos, so we have a precedent.”

As we saw already too many times, authorities stand still in front of these atrocities. It is only thanks to the deserving action of the paladins of our little companions that we can hope to defeat the tragedies of the world — being them about humans or animals.