Association of Simpletons Putting Clothing on Animals

The Association of Simpletons Putting Clothing on Animals (ASPCA) is an international group of stupid people dedicated to preventing animal nudity through the promotion and advancement of stupid costumes sized for dogs, cats and other household pets.
The ASPCA was founded in 1866 by noted photographer, retard, and artist (or photoretardist for short) William Wegman, who would get his jollies by dressing his dogs up in clothing and taking photographs of them. The organization was also popularized by Oscar Wilde, albeit unwillingly.
==Origins==
The main challenge faced by Wegman was the primitive daguerreotype method of photography used in those days, which required the subject to sit perfectly still for 8 to 12 hours, depending on lighting conditions. This process was so time consuming that, during the American Civil War, more time was spent posing for grainy sepia-toned photographs than fighting, marching, and getting gangrenous limbs sawed off combined. After consulting with the unknown artist who created the surrealist masterpiece Dogs Playing Poker, a piece that required countless hours of precision dog posing, he learned that the secret was to find really laid back dogs and get them really wasted.
After some near misses in English pubs (the dogs kept vomiting after the first 6 whiskeys), Wegman turned to the popular opium dens to get his dogs properly blasted. Though the shady lighting of the opium den was not ideal, the ambient vapors coupled with two waterpipes full of Turkish Gold and a bowl full of warm absinthe would keep the dogs docile for hours. Also being kept docile for shorter amounts of time by the same combination of narcotics was a young Oscar Wilde, who wrote twelve plays, fifty poems, 171 pithy sayings, and his famous essay William Wegman: What the Fuck Is This Bullshit while watching Wegman take a single photograph. 
After Wilde sobered up, he edited the essay down to a slim 344 pages, wrote another ten dozen pity saying, had brunch, and approached William to buy some of his photographs for reproduction as monotone plates in his book. Though Wegman initially refused Wilde's offer of 7 pounds and sixpence for 30 photographs, they managed to come to an agreement when Wegman gave Wilde all of his photographs in exchange for a savage beating with a gunny sack half-full of raw potatoes in a dingy alley located somewhere in London's charming East End.
Published that night by The Oscar Wilde Publishing Company Ltd., the book became a runaway success amongst people with inbred brain maladies from the aristocracy to the boonies, as well as finding a niche following with the complete moron crowd.
William Wegman became a minor celebrity, and the ASPCA was founded soon after as a safe place for people to put costumes on their pets, photograph them, and trade the photos with others.
==Role in Modern Times==
Since that time, the ASPCA has spread like a plague or a religion, founding chapters in size order in over 100 countries. This organizational plan was based on the ASPCA philosophy that small = cute, so the ASPCA's oldest and most powerful chapters are located in Vatican City, Monaco, Tuvalu and San Marino. The United States and Canada were actually considered the "Northern Barbados" chapter until 1983.
The ASPCA is currently a fully for-profit organization that makes its money via paid advertisements for stupid pet clothing in their monthly magazine, lobbying for the stupid pet clothing industry and giving it's seal of approval to stupid pet clothing. 
ASPCA Monthly has a subscribership of over 2,000,000 people worldwide. It's only published in one language which changes monthly because "Aww..." translates universally and, similar to a porno magazine, people only buy it for the pictures. Aside form the 50% content of photos depicting pets in clothing and 40% advertising, there are also pictures of porcelain figurines, pictures of wild animals with clothing photoshopped on, and Family Circus cartoons.
Leadership is decided by majority vote, but because fuzzy pets can be called on to vote by proxy the presidency can usually be determined by finding out who smells the most like wee. There's no set term for presidency, but no president has lasted for longer than 6 years, because no president hasn't been elderly, insane or arrested for animal neglect.
==Splinter Groups==
The ASPCA has had a small number of splinter groups. The groups have generally split along the stupid/insane divide.
===The AASPCA===
The AASPCA, the Association for Acute Simpletons Putting Clothing on Animals, is a radically stupid subgroup of the ASPCA that believes that the ASPCA was lowering its standards of cuteness when ASPCA Monthly featured a photo series of reptiles in evening wear titled "lounge lizards". To maintain a more strictly saccharine standard, the AASPCA exclusively promotes dressing fuzzy animals as other fuzzy animals. 
Scandal rocked the AASPCA last year when it was found that Moopsie, the July centerfold dog-in-a-rabbit-costume, was actually a large rabbit not dressed as anything at all.
===The ASPCA===
The ASPCA (not to be confused with the ASPCA) is an early offshoot of the ASPCA. This ASPCA is the Association of Sanctimonious Parishioners for Covering Animals. This fundamentally insane group of religious types believes that all animals in the world must be clothed for the sake of decency. The ASPCA was founded in 1890, but they claim that they would have been founded earlier if they weren't afraid of catching the gay from looking at an Oscar Wilde book. The ASPCA argues that if God wanted animals to be naked, they'd be born that way. When the obvious flaw in their argument is demonstrated, they quickly try to move the goalposts and say that if God intended animals to be naked, he wouldn't have invented animal sized pants. At this point, the opposition usually walks away in disbelief, laughs too hard to continue this line of argument, or headdesks/facepalms itself into unconsciousness.
This group has been shrinking steadily since the end of the Victorian Era due to a decline in Victorian morality and "Operation Daniel", their latest organized campaign to put proper clothing on lions. When faced with the high fatality rate of Operation Daniel, they will rightly point out that it has so far been relatively successful compared to their "Muumuus 4 Grues" initiative in 1955.
==Opposition==
For financial or philosophical reasons, several groups have opposed the ASPCA, the AASPCA, and the ASPCA.
*Lolcats are considered an enemy by the ASPCA since websites full of stupid kitten pictures with captions has taken a significant bite out of pictures of kittens market. Many talented photoretardists have quit before reaching their full potential, attracted by the quick and easy glory of downloading other people's pets and captioning them with hackneyed, overused meme phrases. Lolcatters have been careful not to caption pictures of cats wearing clothing too frequently in fear of a full on reprisal from the ASPCA.
*Furries (notably fursuiters) and mascots have had a longstanding philosophical objection to the ASPCA, as the idea of dressing animals as people is diametrically opposed to their practice of people dressing as animals. Government-sponsored dress-like-your-pet Halloween contests have done little to diffuse tensions and may only be serving to confuse things.
*Pets consider the ASPCA to be an enemy, though the inverse is not true. The discovery of a cat dressed in a blood stained sailor suit feasting on a claw-flayed corpse clutching a camera in its cold, dead hand has become all too common for many suburban police precincts. Pets involved in crimes such as these usually get off with a plea of temporary insanity and can often be rehabilitated with a long term program of casual ownership and nakedness.
Oscar Wilde is also a vehement opponent of the ASPCA, for reasons you can probably guess.
Category:Pets
Category:Stupidity
Category:Organizations
Category:People Who Need an Asskicking