The Insane Reason PETA Is Unhappy With Nintendo

So PETA is angry with Nintendo... but not for reasons you would think. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent a scathing letter to Nintendo over their treatment of farm animals in one of their more popular Nintendo Switch titles.

Polygon is reporting that PETA has come down on Nintendo for their game 1-2-Switch. Recently, Nintendo participated in a media event with a dairy farm in a challenge to see who could milk cows better in 1-2-Switch: dairy farmers or hardcore gamers.

PETA was displeased with how positive the game 1-2-Switch was being perceived for its cow-milking mini-game, where players use the left and right Joy-Con controllers to imitate milking udders in order to fill up their cup with milk.

The mini-game doesn't actually show cows being milked, and it's a rather simple mini-game designed to be fun at parties or get-togethers.

PETA found this to be rather distasteful.

In their letter to Nintendo, which ended up being pasted up on Facebook, they chastised Nintendo for not being more realistic in their depiction of animal cruelty that cows undergo during the milking process.

According to PETA, the 1-2-Switch mini-game glamorizes the act of milking cows and does not show the harm and dangers associated with milking cows, nor does it show some of the unsavory acts that cows endure at some dairy farms.

Ingrid E. Newkirk, the head of PETA, stated that over the course of 35 years of working at dairy farms, she noted that milking cows was "never" a pleasant experience for the animals. She asked... "can we have some realism here, please?"

At this point the game is already shipped... it fact, it's been shipped since March 3rd, 2017. So, with being available on the market for a month, this means that Nintendo would have to completely rework the game if they wanted to add more "realistic" portrayals of cows being milked in 1-2-Switch for the Nintendo Switch.

The thing is... why would they?

It's an expensive task to completely bring back the development team, adding in all new animations for the cow, making the cow look uncomfortable (which would surely make players uncomfortable) and then adding in either real footage of cows or 3D cows in pain during the milking process. It would be a quick way to kill sales of 1-2-Switch. The party game is all about bringing people together to feel good, and I doubt seeing farm animals in discomfort and pain would help accomplish that.

Of course, the other alternative is for Nintendo to completely remove the milking mini-game from the Nintendo Switch exclusive. This is another net negative since it would cost money to remove an entire aspect of the game, and Nintendo doesn't really gain anything from that. Plus, the milking mini-game appears to be one of the more popular offerings from 1-2-Switch.

This isn't the first time PETA has targeted Nintendo, as they also went after them for the Super Mario tanooki suit and for Pokemon.

Polygon attempted to reach out to Nintendo regarding the matter, but the company hasn't responded yet.