Students Protest Call Of Duty Dog Killing (Kotaku 20/3/09)

Students at the Academy of Notre Dame in Tyngsboro, Massachusetts, are up in arms over Activision's Call of Duty: World at War for promoting the killing of deadly attack dogs.

Breanna Lucci, the 19-year-old president of the private high school's Animal Rights Club started a petition against seeing her brother shooting at dogs in the game. So far more than 100 of Lucci's classmates have signed the petition, which she hopes to forward to Activision, who will do absolutely nothing about it.

"Killing dogs as a form of entertainment ... over and over again. That's one o the objects of the game," says Lucci, 19, a senior at NDA. "Parents need to know what they are buying their kids. Killing animals should not be a form of entertainment."

One of the objects in the game? I suppose she could mean objectives, and she'd still be wrong. Killing the dogs is but one aspect of a much larger objective: staying alive.

See, running down the street shooting dogs willy-nilly is bad. You don't pump them full of bullets for rolling over and wagging their tails. You give them hugs, and call them Mr. Snugglewuffkins, despite what their actual names might be. I think we can all get behind this idea.

Dogs trained to tear out your throat, on the other hand, you shoot. You shoot them quickly, and should they roll over on their backs and wag their little stumpy tails, you shoot them more, because that's a trap. They don't want belly rubs; they want to taste your innards.

Call me a monster or an extremist, but I think it's perfectly fine to teach our children to defend themselves from wild animals that want to eat them.

I think the best part of the original story is the lede:

Breanna Lucci knows her two Pomeranians — Fluffy and Winnie the Pooh — would not last two seconds in "Call of Duty: World at War," the immensely popular video game in which the animated gore piles high.

No, her two dogs wouldn't survive two seconds. They'd be ripped apart by the virtual dogs she is trying to defend, possibly because they're named "Fluffy" and "Winnie the Pooh".

Incidentally, I think the Germans would have been a lot less sinister had they deployed squads of attack Pomeranians. "Kleine Hunde angreifen!"

horray for mindless massacar