PETA's Animal Crossing Guide

Submission 16,866

Part of a series on People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). [View Related Entries]

About

PETAs Animal Crossing Guide refers to a post and article published by animal rights group PETA urging Animal Crossing players to play the game vegan and pointing out where it's possible. The post made in March 2020 was mocked on Twitter for concentrating efforts on virtual animals.

Origin

On March 23rd, 2020, PETA^[1] published an article called "PETA’s Vegan Guide to ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons’" which urged players to abstain from fishing, catching bugs, clams or hermit crabs and from building a dog house. The group posted the article to their Twitter^[2] account and gained over 3,800 likes and 1,700 retweets in three days (shown below).

Spread

On March 24th, 2020, Twitter users began mocking the PETA article. Twitter user @PhantomArtifice^[3] tweeted "PETA WHAT ARE YOU ON GO AWAY IT'S ANIMAL CROSSING GOOD GRIEF" which received over 53,500 likes in two days (shown below, left). That same day, Twitter user @owlgoddess24^[4] tweeted, "peta when they kill a dog vs peta when someone plays animal crossing" comparing two images (shown below, right). The tweet accumulated over 280 likes in two days.

On March 24th, Twitter user @comradevenustas^[5] tweeted, "hi, i'm vegan! yes it's vegan to play animal crossing and fish in animal crossing and catch bugs in animal crossing veganism is the reduction of animal exploitation from our lives and diets
animal crossing is a game PETA please…you are making this SO hard for activists 😭" (shown below). The tweet gained over 2,400 likes and 430 retweets in two days. The next day, PopBuzz^[6] published an article about reactions to PETA's guide.