PETA, the suffragette of the animal rights world, has a history of using videogames as springboards for attention and today its doing it again, by using Assassin's Creed IV's suggested whaling mechanic as a method to draw attention to contemporary whaling.

“Whaling – that is, shooting whales with harpoons and leaving them to struggle for an hour or more before they die or are hacked apart while they are still alive – may seem like something out of the history books, but this bloody industry still goes on today in the face of international condemnation, and it’s disgraceful for any game to glorify it,” a statement posted onVentureBeat reads.

“PETA encourages video game companies to create games that celebrate animals – not games that promote hurting and killing them.”

This is the same kind of spiel that we heard with the PETA vs Pokemon story. PETA pretends that in-game violence against animals results in real world violence against animals; of course not taking into consideration the context of the game. In the case of Pokemon, the fact that the player is said to win his battles because he loves his pokemon more, while in Assassin's Creed IV, it's something that happened in that time period and was more of a survival tool than for something as senseless as “research.”

KitGuru Says: While I don't agree with a lot of PETA's practices, especially when they target innocuous games and make out as if they're bad – like games need any more negative press at the moment – when it does stuff like this, I'm not so bothered. It's clearly just a piggy back and not anything malicious.

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