Peta Protests on World of Warcraft - I am Not Making This Up

"Animal rights protests reach Warcraft's world"
Yahoo! Games (April 7, 2009)

"In its latest attempt to stop Canadian seal clubbing, animal rights organization PETA is taking its protests to new shores.

"Specifically, PETA's planning a gathering in the icy northern kingdom of the world's biggest online game, World of Warcraft, where a team of four seal killers is apparently clubbing their way through the continent's baby animal population.

" 'Anyone who slaughters baby seals for their fur must surely be in service to the evil Lich King,' said PETA on a Facebook page set up to publicize the gathering, referencing one of Warcraft's key bad guys...."

The evil Lich King is a fictional character, by the way.

"PETA Invading World of Warcraft to Prevent Clubbing of Baby Seals"
MAXIMUMPC (April 8, 2009)

"PETA has decided – in a nutshell – to grief a bunch of WoW players because they’ve taken to bonking adorable-ish piles of pixels with equally imaginary weapons. Can we do Mac users next?

" 'That's right, gamers, get ready: This Saturday, World of Warcraft (WoW) players will have the opportunity to combat a team of four Horde seal killers. We need your help to stop them from bashing in the heads of any more seals!” reads a post on PETA's blog.

" 'Activists from across the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor are banding together to put a stop to the atrocious seal slaughter. Anyone who slaughters baby seals for their fur must surely be in service to the evil Lich King.'..."

Again, the evil Lich King is fictional, and the World of Warcraft is an online game - presumably PETA people know this, and are simply following the teachings of Captain Planet.

Interestingly, a post at eurogamer.net got pulled down some time in the last two days. There could be perfectly good technical or procedural reasons: but I wonder if the eurogamer folks didn't realize that PETA was making a fool of itself - and wanted to limit the damage.

I think fur seals are cute, by the way, and all that: but come on, let's keep at least a toe or two in the real world.

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Thanks to #1 daughter, for providing the links - along with "Just when you thought they couldn't get any weirder...".