The People Who Want to Free Pikachu

Animals—I genuinely love them, and would try to save them all if half of them didn’t taste so good. That’s my baseline. Which makes it even more galling that PETA, month after month, manages to be the loudest voice supposedly on the same side. If you’re not familiar: these are the animal advocates who’ve been caught putting down dogs in the backs of vans, and who ran a full campaign against Super Mario for the crime of wearing a Tanooki suit.

Since protecting actual wildlife and funding real sanctuaries apparently lost its appeal, the organization has pivoted toward parodying pop culture and generating the kind of press that makes everyone who genuinely cares about animals want to change the subject. Their latest target: Pokémon Black 2 and White 2, newly released on Nintendo DS.

PETA’s response is a Flash game called Pokémon Black and Blue, in which a blood-soaked, furious Pikachu and friends exact revenge on the humans who’ve been stuffing them into Poké Balls and staging death matches for the amusement of perverted professors and underage power fantasies. The premise, squinted at from exactly the right angle, is almost defensible.

Just like many animals in the real world, Pokémon are treated as objects and used for entertainment and experiments, PETA wrote in the press release. The way Pokémon are stuffed into Poké Balls is similar to how elephants are kept chained in circuses, learning painful tricks under threat of electric shock.

I respect the WWF. I think factory farming is a genuine moral disaster, and I hold neither of those positions ironically. But burning donor money on Flash games about cartoon monsters while real animals suffer in real conditions is the kind of performance activism that makes every cause it touches look ridiculous. PETA stopped being about animals a long time ago. It’s about PETA.

Now go play the actual game. Pikachu’s fine.