Students Angry at Call of Duty for Dog Killing

The Call of Duty franchise is one of the most popular shooter series currently on the market. Created by Infinity Ward and developed by both the studio and Treyarch under the publishing umbrella of Activision, the series has taken pride in depicting almost all the conditions from World War II as well as those in modern times.

Part of the battlefield was the presence of attack dogs, vicious animals that would love nothing more than to indulge in a big chunk of the player-controlled character’s flesh. When said dogs would appear, the player was required to take a knife swing at them in order to neutralize them.

This action annoyed a lot of students from the Academy of Notre Dame in Tyngsboro, Massachusetts, who started a petition against Activision in order to stop portraying such vicious acts in its titles. Started by Breanna Lucci, the 19-year-old president of the private high school's Animal Rights Club, the petition already has 100 signatures on it and she hopes that the gaming corporation will take heed of this act.

“Killing dogs as a form of entertainment ... over and over again. That's one of the objects of the game,” Lucci said. “Parents need to know what they are buying their kids. Killing animals should not be a form of entertainment. My little 12-pound Pomeranian, Winnie the Pooh, is sitting next to my brother, who is playing Call of Duty: World at War, and I'm thinking, 'This looks horrible!' My brother is a sweetheart. He won't be killing dogs after playing. But some people might.”

The students are also backed up Jen Dupras of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who believes that even though video games imply virtual actions, they have a negative influence on the players. “I feel like these video games are dangerous for a lot of reasons. We can all rationalize and say it's just pretend. Even so, why pretend shooting people and dogs? They really desensitize kids and adults to what that violence signifies.”

If the game had portrayed gratuitous violence against animals, then there would have been a problem, but the fact of the matter remains, Germans trained attack dogs for use on the battlefield and they were no longer the cute little animals we know, but vicious beasts.

Hopefully Activision won't take heed of this petition and strive to bring titles as realistically accurate as possible.