People haven't understood your post, I think. This is supposed to be art. You are asking whether one is morally obliged to accept that deliberate cruelty is an instance of creative endeavour.
I will categorically refute anyone's right or license to commit acts of cruelty in the name of art or entertainment.
I will add that I do not support fox hunting, bear dancing, or bull fighting. I do not like the Grand National and wish it could be replaced by something more humane. I am against commercial whaling and sealing and detest all hunting that is not for the specific purposes of keeping a tribe alive with food. Scooping massive shoals of fish out of the sea to feed chronically overpopulated humans is environmentally irresponsible. Taking lobsters, crabs, other shell fish and sharks in enormous numbers for human delicacy consumption fills me with venom. Slaughtering animals for trophies makes me want to start a human hunting farm to see how the vicious cowards like it when the boot is on the other foot.
I think you get the picture. The same goes for tree felling and "development". Humans are an overpopulated, grossly overestimated species that is killing one of the most magnificent accidents in the universe, our earth, and all she holds for a moment in cosmic time.
I hope the artist who starves the dog, the dirty rotten scoundrels who allow him to and anyone who comes to gawp at the hapless victim's suffering are gifted by the law of cause and effect with appropriate fates.