The latest installation of the game Farm Simulator will add a pig farming feature and the people at PETA are super salty about it. The animal rights organization is demanding that the game’s creator, Switzerland-based GIANTS Software, include graphic video of pigs at a slaughterhouse to show players the harsh realities of the meat industry.
Pigs’ legs and lungs are so weak after the animals spend their short, miserable lives confined to severely crowded, filthy sheds on factory farms that when they arrive at the abattoir, they can barely walk. Despite this, when they see open space ahead of them, some begin running for the first time in their lives, overjoyed at their first apparent taste of freedom. Then suddenly, they collapse and cannot get up. They can only lie there, trying to breathe, their bodies racked with pain from abuse and neglect on factory farms. They’re then strung up, upside down, whilst they await slaughter. The slaughterers are in such a hurry that pigs are often only half or insufficiently stunned, wake up while they bleed, and are still alive and conscious when they’re plunged into boiling water.
PETA stipulates that if GIANTS doesn’t have the balls to include gross footage of pig murder, they should change the name of the game to Vegan Farm Simulator 17, which would remove all the features but crop farming.
Watching the trailer of this relaxing pastoral recreation, it does make you wonder how disheartening videos of slaughterhouse malpractice would factor into the gameplay. Probably not well.
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