THE HUMAN DESIRE TO ANTHROPOMORPHIZE ANIMALS SEEMS TO BE UNBOUNDED. From doggie dress ups, canine birthday parties and pet cemeteries to the time-honored use of animals as product spokescritters - I'm thinking of canned tuna here - there seems to be no limit to the imagination and creativity thrown in that direction. Tuesday's DART touched on a more high-minded view of this phenomenon in a piece about photographers who have taken up the subject of natural history museums and dioramas.

Video capture of Friskies Adventureland commercial created by Avrett, Free and Ginsberg.

That evening while watching the Olympics, I saw a commercial that shifted the idea of taxidermized wild animals in natural history dioramas into reverse - to cute and hilarious effect. A new ad for Friskies, called Adventureland - and clearly inspired by the frenzied anticipation of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland - shows a kitty leaping through the rabbit hole and landing in a psychedelic dream world peppered with all the yummy treats a cat could desire. This is an animation for sure, but using an actual cat. Could this be considered a form of video taxidermy? Not only is it funny and well executed; there's something genuinely sweet about it, perhaps because its creators would have to really love cats to come up with something as charming as this. See it on YouTube.

But lest we get too cozy with the idea of interspecies communications, the TV news offered up truly chilling evidence against human contact with wild creatures - in a week that also saw an airing of Gorillas in the Mist, a docudrama about wildlife biologist Dian Fossey who was hooked on primates and met a grisly end in her quest to defend her subjects. Perhaps even more horrifying, because it occurred in public, was the deadly meeting yesterday of a killer whale with its long-time trainer at Florida's Sea World while spectators looked on. It remains to be known what actually happened and what was might have caused the whale to behave as it did - and this is super chilling - for the third time.