Performance art is bad enough just to watch at times, but what if you were forced to participate in the events against your will? In recent years and months, a series of art stunts involving animal participants has attracted controversy in the form of protesters, police actions, and prison sentences, not to mention plenty of PETA announcements. Below, see ARTINFO’s round-up of 10 animal-based artworks that attracted the wrong kind of audience. Several of these projects eventually had to be put down.

1. Enrique Gomez De Molina’s Hybrid Exotic Taxidermy (2012)

In December 2011 the Miami-based sculptor Enrique Gomez De Molina pleaded guilty to illegally trafficking parts of protected and endangered animals to be used in his surreal hybrid taxidermy sculptures. Many of the animals were still alive when he purchased them and were killed before being delivered. Earlier this month he was sentenced to 20 months in federal prison.

2. Amber Hansen’s Chicken Run (2012)

Last month a project by the Kansas University artist-in-residence and Andy Warhol Foundation grant recipient Amber Hansen that was intended to call attention to animal cruelty in the state’s many chicken slaughterhouses was itself protested and eventually banned due to charges of animal cruelty. For “The Story of Chickens: A Revolution,” Hansen planned to put a coop with five live chickens on public display at locations throughout Lawrence, Kansas, letting viewers interact with the birds, before slaughtering them at a public ceremony and serving them to the audience. The ritualistic interactive public performance, meant to elicit empathy for the animals, apparently achieved its goal before it even began.

3. Robert Rauschenberg’s Bald Eagle (1959/2012)

Robert Rauschenberg's 1959 assemblage "Canyon" is one of the artist's most famous works. The 53-year-old painting, which features a stuffed bald eagle hanging off the front, caused a stir recently when it became the subject of a squabble between the estate of the late art dealer Ileana Sonnabend and the IRS. Sonnabend's estate argues that the presence of the bird makes the artwork impossible to sell (two federal laws bar trafficking in bald eagles, dead or alive). The IRS, however, maintains that "Canyon" could be sold for a pretty penny on the black market, and the estate is therefore liable to pay tax on the work, which the taxman values at $60 million. Just goes to show it doesn't matter how long the eagle's been stuffed — it can still ruffle feathers.

4. Wim Delvoye’s Inked-Up Pigs (2011)

By tattooing live pigs from Beijing’s Art Farm China with designs ranging from Louis Vuitton logos to more traditional biker-inspired pastiches, Belgian artist Wim Delvoye was making a commentary on the process of art-making, “harvesting” his art instead of “producing” it (the pig’s skins, stretched or stuffed, could later be bought as art objects). He was also making a lot of animal activists very angry. Though the tattooing is carried out while the pigs are heavily sedated, critics were upset that Delvoye was causing the animals undue pain, as well as aesthetic misfortune. The pigs’ lives snuffling through a green forest and laying around in stalls doesn’t seem nearly as bad as some meat operations in the United States, though.

5. Damien Hirst’s Butterfly Bike (2009)

No living creature is safe from art controversy: Damien Hirst once decorated a bike for cyclist Lance Armstrong with (real-life) butterfly wings. The butterflies were bred specifically for the bike; Hirst wanted live specimens because real wings caught the light in a particularly nice, inimitable way. PETA called the bike "barbaric and horrific," ruining "the essence of Armstrong's spirit." The cyclist, however, loved the bike, according to Hirst. 

6. Adel Abdessemed’s Animal Death Matches (2008)

The Algerian artist Adel Abdessemed came under fire from animal rights groups twice in 2008, first for his exhibition “Don’t Trust Me” at the San Francisco Art Institute, which was eventually canceled following protests and death threats sparked by a video of several animals — a horse, an ox, a deer, a pig, a goat, and a sheep — being killed by hammer blows on Mexican farms. The following month the 1:27 minute video “Usine” from his first solo show at David Zwirner gallery raised eyebrows again; in it a group of animals including pit bulls, roosters, snakes, mice, tarantulas, iguanas, and scorpions, were put in an enclosure together and left to kill each other — though it turned out that most only attacked those of their own species.

7. Huang Yong Ping’s Critter Battle Royale (2007)

In 2007, the Vancouver Art Gallery showed French-Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping's piece "Theatre of the World," which was made up of "various snakes, lizards, scorpions, and insects" all housed in a single cage together. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals asked a veterinarian to evaluate the work, which seemed designed to force the normally separated creatures to fight each other, and recommended changes were made to the sculpture.

8. Guillermo Vargas’s “Dead” Street Dog (2007)

Guillermo Vargas, a Costa-Rican artist also known as Habacuc, claimed that for his piece “Exposition No. 1” he chained a street dog to a wall of a gallery and left it to die as commentary on the plight of a burglar who was mauled to death by guard dogs while police watched. Habacuc’s work drew immediate criticism for its blatant animal cruelty and led to a petition for the artist to be criminally charged and removed from the 2008 Honduras Biennial. Fortunately, the truth of the work was more complicated. It turns out that Vargas had actually leaked the story and accompanying photos of the dog chained up to the press, and then waited for the backlash to start. The dog was actually well-fed and cared for the entire time, though it managed to escape from the gallery one night. Vargas calls this series of works about misinformation and the hypocrisies of the media “You Are What You Read.”

9. Marco Evaristti’s Goldfish Smoothie (2000)

In 2000 the Chilean-born Danish artist Marco Evaristti created the installation “Helena” for his solo show at the Trapholt Art Museum in Kolding, Denmark, in which the audience was invited to turn on ten blenders with live goldfish in them. One visitor blended two goldfish, leading museum director Peter Meyer to be fined $270. The fine was later revoked by a Danish court, which ruled that the goldfish had not endured prolonged suffering, but were killed instantly and humanely.

10. Tom Otterness Shot His Dog (1977)

The Brooklyn-based sculptor Tom Otterness has become a beloved and very successful artist with his playful metal sculptures of cartoonish figures perpetrating untold mischief — such as those seen by millions of commuters in the New York City subway station at 14th Street and Eighth Avenue — but nearly every time he wins a major public commission an all-too-real work from his past comes back to haunt him. Most recently one of two commissions awarded to Otterness for new sculptures in San Francisco was canceled following public outcry over his 1977 short “Shot Dog Film,” in which the artist shoots and kills an adopted dog. 

To see examples of the artworks mentioned in this story, click on the slide show.