animal rights
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Amazon will stop selling donkey skin gelatin, but only in California
Amazon will no longer sell donkey-based products to California residents. The online retailer settled with a nonprofit that filed a complaint, alleging the products violated state animal welfare laws protecting horses.
PETA parody 'Pokemon Black and Blue' fights for fictional animal rights
In celebration of Pokemon Black 2 and White 2 launching yesterday, animal-rights group PETA today released Pokemon Black and Blue, a parody game with the tagline "Gotta free 'em all." Pokemon Black and Blue has players embody Pikachu as he fights against trainers for liberation from what PETA sees as a torturous, imprisoned life."Much like animals in the real world, Pokemon are treated as unfeeling objects and used for such things as human entertainment and as subjects in experiments," PETA writes. "The way that Pokemon are stuffed into pokeballs is similar to how circuses chain elephants inside railroad cars and let them out only to perform confusing and often painful tricks that were taught using sharp steel-tipped bullhooks and electric shock prods."This isn't PETA's first foray into activist gaming; in December 2010 it released Super Tofu Boy, a parody of Super Meat Boy. Team Meat responded to PETA by including Tofu Boy as a playable character in a Steam update of Super Meat Boy.Pokemon Black and Blue demonstrates that while it's terrible to punch, kick, cut or hit fictional animals with bats, it's perfectly acceptable to electrocute humans. Also, words can hurt just as much as quick attacks. And hugs. Give Pokemon Black and Blue a shot in the embedded game below (Warning: It has music and will auto-play).
Mass. students protest Call of Duty: World at War dog violence
Breanna Lucci, a student at Massachusetts' Academy of Notre Dame high school, has a bone to pick with Activision. (Which, we imagine, she'll later give to her two Pomeranians, "Fluffy" and "Winnie The Pooh.") Lucci, the president of her school's Animal Rights Club, is upset by the need to shoot Nazi attack dogs in Call of Duty: World at War. So, she's started a petition."Parents need to know what they are buying their kids. Killing animals should not be a form of entertainment," Lucci told the local Lowell Sun. She was first introduced to the game's canine genocide while watching her college aged brother playing. "My little 12-pound Pomeranian, Winnie the Pooh, is sitting next to him, and I'm thinking, 'This looks horrible!'" Although she's sure her brother "won't be killing dogs after playing," she believes "some people might." Lucci plans to forward her petition, which has been signed by more than 100 of her fellow students, to Activision. Contrary to some petitions aimed at game publishers, hers is simply a show of disgust, and does not call for any executives to be fired, boiled alive or hung by their feet until dead. You go, girl.[Via GamePolitics]
