Why PETA is Protesting in Animal Crossing
Channel: Video Game Story Time
Date: 2020-05-22

PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, have a bone to pick with Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Specifically, the activism group seems to really, really hate Blathers and his carefully curated museum?

The reason? Because the museum has an aquarium and a vivarium. According to PETA, catching (digital, pretend) fish and insects, then putting them in (digital, pretend) cages is cruel and simply not vegan. Blathers is cancelled.

(This despite the fact that Blathers doesn't actually WANT a bunch of creepy crawly insects in his museum, but puts them there to tolerate the player...)

This is far from the first time PETA has picked a fight with Nintendo. The animal rights group can't seem to stop harassing the company for making games featuring animals.

Pokemon Black and Blue, the parody flash game, kind of makes sense. After all, we've never really bought Professor Oak's repeated claims that no, seriously, Pokemon LOVE battling each other.

Less logical is the claim that Mario's tanooki suit is made of real tanuki fur. Is it? Really? Honestly, if you're going to go after Mario, he's perpetrated far worse crimes against animals in his long history.

It almost seems as if PETA's motivation isn't actually an attempt to stand up for oppressed animals. It ALMOST seems like their goal, instead, is to get as much attention as possible by doing weird stuff.

If this is the case, congratulations PETA, mission accomplished.

For the record, this video was written by Kotor, who tries to eat vegan whenever possible, but isn't strict about it because he hates seeing food go to waste. He agrees with some of PETA's efforts to stop animal cruelty, but with issues like this, he just doesn't understand what they're hoping to accomplish.

Anyway, hope you're having a good day and staying safe. Next week: Xenoblade Chronicles!
Lots of love,

BretonStripes (http://twitter.com/bretonstriped) and Kotor (http://twitter.com/kotorcomics)

Sources:
https://www.peta.org/features/animal-crossing-new-horizons-vegan/
https://games.peta.org/pokemon-black-and-white-parody/
https://games.peta.org/mario-kills-tanooki/