A piggy bank made from a real piglet has drawn a protest from the Winnipeg Humane Society. (thecheeky.com)

The Winnipeg Humane Society is calling for a protest over an item in a holiday gift guide — a piggy bank made out of a real piglet, stuffed and mounted.

The bank, mentioned in Vancouver Magazine, is featured on a website called thecheeky.com, which describes itself as providing "ideas to make the World Wide Web smile and from time to time frown like a baby eating a lemon."

Aileen White, spokeswoman for the Winnipeg Humane Society, said she is disgusted with the people behind the item.

"It's such an incredible in-your-face trivialization of what was once a living being," she said. "It just demonstrates such callousness and insensitivity."

The bank, with a $4,000 price tag, is described on thecheeky.com as "the piggy bank of all piggy banks."

The website states the bank is "designed for anyone who has far too much money and loose change."

"It's a real piglet that has been taxidermied and inserted with what all piglets probably dream of as babies, a coin storage unit and a cork plug. Make your plush overpriced apartment complete with this little guy," states the website. "We don't actually kill the piglets; they die of natural causes and these are the ones that we use."

The bank is said to take up to 12 months to produce from the time of order.

The Winnipeg Humane Society was notified about it by someone who noticed it online, said White.

She has sent an email to the magazine to express her disappointment, as well as to the website, requesting that it stop selling the item.

She said she has not received any response.