Aspen Art Museum's exhibit featuring iPads on tortoises: Art or animal abuse?

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A petition drive is underway asking the Aspen Art Museum to stop its plans for an art exhibit featuring live tortoises with iPads on their backs.

The new Aspen Art Museum is scheduled to open Saturday.

The art museum's website says one of the first exhibits, Moving Ghost Town by Cai Guo-Qiang, features "three African Sulcata tortoises roam freely on a section of natural turf similar to local grasslands. With iPads mounted to their backs, the tortoises feature video footage of three local ghost towns, which were filmed by the creatures themselves."

While the description calls for just three tortoises, a rendering of the exhibit shows several more.

The Art Museum's website says, "Forgotten stories of the once prosperous ghost towns are retold from the tortoises’ perspective."

However, some community members are asking the museum to cancel the exhibit calling it animal abuse.

A petition drive posted on Change.org Tuesday says, "Since when is animal abuse art?  We must all rise and stop this now!! There is no excuse for this!"

"Please stop this unnecessary exploitation of animals now and do the right thing by getting these iPad of the Tortoises' backs and make sure they are given to a sanctuary where they will never be abused like this again and put pressure on the artist to vow he will never do anything like this to any other animal ever again," the petition says.

7NEWS called the Aspen Art Museum Wednesday morning to ask for their reaction to the petition. We will add their response when we hear back from them.