by E. Zachary Knight on March 24, 2009 (photo by Sarah Jones, available under a CC license)

animal rights, Animal Rights Club, animals, Call of Duty, Call of Duty: World at War, dogs, PETA

What do you do if a blood thirsty trained attack dog is charging you with a taste for your jugular? If you are a member of PETA or Animal Rights Club at the Academy of Notre Dame in Tyngsboro, Mass., you would simply yield your life to the snarling beast. If, however, you play Call of Duty: World at War or are a member of Activision’s Call of Duty Team, you know the answer is “shoot the beast before he gets a chance to kill you.”

Recently a young woman by the name of Breanna Lucci made a startling discovery, you can kill trained attack dogs in Call of Duty: World at War. Of course, she seems a bit off by the context of these killings.

“Killing dogs as a form of entertainment … over and over again. That’s one of 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.”

Shortly after PETA made a statement to GamePolitics.com on the matter and later reiterated it on their blog.

Not since we were pitted against Nazi attack dogs when we first escaped from Castle Wolfenstein 17 years ago have we seen such barbaric treatment of dogs in gameplay as we did in Call of Duty, World of War.

To help the folks at Activision Blizzard learn about the ethical treatment of animals, we’re offering to let them take PETA’s “Developing Empathy for Animals” free of charge and are sending a package of Nintendogs games to their office.

That’s a thoughtful gesture, now isn’t it? Though they seem to love Nintendo’s fur-friendly games, PETA is the same group that  attacked Cooking Mama for being cruel to animals by including dishes made from meat.

Personally, I have nothing against people who want to prevent cruelty to animals, but this is a bit far fetched. They have missed the point of the Call of Duty games. These games are not about “Killing dogs as a form of entertainment”, they are about reenacting the terrors of war whether fictional or historical. One historical aspect of World War II, in which this game takes place, is the use of trained attack dogs from all sides of the conflict to assist in battle. Even the Russians were in on this, taking it a step further. They trained dogs strapped with explosives to run under tanks. Unfortunately for them, the effort failed as the Russian trainers used their own tanks as props rather than those of the Germans.

Their other fallacy is the concept that people who play games will act out the game in real life. They fear that kids who kill attack dogs in the game will go out and slaughter the neighbor’s Pomeranian and other helpless dogs on the street. Yet again, there is no scientific confirmation that this is the case.

Had these two groups taken the time to research the use of dogs in war, they would most likely came to a different conclusion. They would probably had been more appalled by the concept of training dogs to kill in the first place. That is what put these dogs in the line of fire not just their mere presence.

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