Prof’s pug safe and sound

A MySpace page purporting to kill a pug named Oscar is a hoax, university and police officials say. The bizarre case spread across the Internet and national media, pulling the VCU Adcenter into the online limelight.

On Friday, a user identified as Jason, a 19-year-old Richmonder, said he would kill “Oscar, a four-year old Pug I took in from a couple that couldn’t keep him anymore… Wednesday, at an undisclosed location.”

It began Sept. 12 when Mike Lear, adjunct professor and senior copywriter at the Martin Agency, gave students in a creative thinking class an assignment to make something famous – his dog.

“I just picked a random object really, my dog,” Lear said.

In the assignment and in class, he said the only restriction was that they couldn’t harm or kill the dog or imply they would.

“It’s a cheap way out,” he said. “I can make anything famous by breaking the law, and that’s why I asked to have that eliminated.”

Lear said the details on the page were off – his dog is six years old – and the photo was of another dog, leading him to think it wasn’t one of his students.

He feels someone outside the Adcenter made the threatening page.

“It’s like a buzz is created by my students, and someone saw it and basically pranked it,” he said.

Pam Lepley of University News Services said there would be consequences if a VCU student pulled the prank.

“We don’t know who did it. We just know we don’t condone it,” she said. It was not likely one of Lear’s students did it because “they’d automatically fail the assignment because it fails the parameters,” Lepley said.

After the page, MySpace.com/jasonlives88, went live Friday, word of the dog’s alleged peril fanned out across the Internet. Users of MySpace, Craiglist and other online communities spread word of the threat. They contacted the Richmond Police Department, Richmond SPCA and the media.

Calls “were above average for a case” and escalated over the weekend, said Kirsten Nelson, a public information officer with the Richmond Police Department.

“Our cyber crimes detectives knew about it early on,” she said. “They tracked it down and determined that there was no actual threat to an animal.”

An Adcenter student working at CBS 6 made the connection to the class assignment, Lepley said.

Allison Gianotto runs Pet-Abuse.com, a searchable archive of over 9,000 animal-cruelty cases.

“Obviously I’m very glad it’s a hoax, but this is indicative of a trend of online cruelty,” she said.

“The message… it’s sending out to online communities is that it’s okay,” Gianotto said. “It sends terrible, really inhumane messages. We have enough of those online. We don’t need any more.”

It reminded her of SaveToby.com, where someone threatened to kill and cook a rabbit unless visitors donated $50,000. The Web site showed pictures of a rabbit in a pot and on a cutting board by a large knife.

Gianotto said people have been charged for documented online animal abuse.

“People have posted videos of them hurting animals on MySpace and they have been arrested. The point is that people are being prosecuted for cruelty being committed online. They need to think twice before doing something like this,” she said.

Lepley said the bizarre case is “not what the Adcenter is about. It’s not what advertising is about.”

As for the assignment, Lear said he’s seen great ideas from his students.

“The projects were really cool,” he said. “One created a line of underwear called ‘Stinky Oscar’ – really cool, fashionable stuff.” Another student convinced a local musician to write a song about Oscar for his next album, and another made a pop-up children’s book about the dog. Coppola’s Deil has named a sandwich after Oscar, Lear said.

As for the real Oscar?

“He’s great, and very happy, and really doesn’t understand when news trucks pull up in front of his house,” Lear said.