The petition began circulating in October 2007 and seeks to prevent Costa Rican artist Guillermo Vargas from representing his country in an upcoming multinational art exhibition (Bienal Centroamericana Honduras 2008) due to his involvement in producing a controversial display for an August 2007 art exhibit in Nicaragua that featured a stray dog allegedly captured from the streets and confined on a bare art gallery floor with no amenities (e.g., food, water, bedding, shelter, toys) until it starved to death. (The artist's point was supposedly to highlight the hypocrisy demonstrated by people's making an apparently sick and ill-fed dog the center of attention when it was presented as an art exhibit, even though many of them would ignore the same dog if they encountered it roaming the streets.)

The most extreme claims about this exhibit maintain that the dog was continually mistreated, confined in the gallery and denied food and water for several days until it finally starved to death.