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Founded in 1980 to fight for the rights of animals, PETA made headlines in 1981 by publicizing the Silver Spring monkeys. They apparently blew their idea wad early and have since come up with some ridiculous stunts to promote themselves. This article looks back at the 8 most retarded PETA stunts.

1. Save the Sea Kittens

PETA decided that people eat fish because they aren’t adorable enough (and not because they’re delicious) so they tried to give them a more cuddly image. They produced plush dolls and cute pictures of “Sea Kittens” frolicking like Snorks along with a plethora of sea kitten facts, including gems like: “Sea kittens talk to each other through squeaks, squeals, and other low-frequency sounds that humans can only hear through special instruments. Most ichthyologists – scientists who specialize in sea kitten biology – agree that this is just about the cutest thing ever.” They capped off the insanity by asking jam band Phish to rename themselves “Sea Kittens”. Phish was presumably too stoned to respond. The campaign didn’t resonate with anyone. In fact, only 14,000 people signed the petition and considering that PETA’s membership is over 2 million (by their own numbers), that means that less than 1% of their own organization gave a shit about the campaign.

2. Feeding kids meat is child abuse

News stories made it sound like poor 14-year-old Alexander Draper ballooned to 555-lbs because his mother, Jerri Gray, fed him like a goose being prepared for foie gras. It put him at risk for serious health problems – including potentially needing a liver transplant – and caused a lot of angry talk radio listeners to call in and rant about the disintegration of America. Not wanting to miss an opportunity to cash in on someone’s misfortune, PETA launched an ad campaign that blamed the obesity epidemic on meat. Most of the mouth-frothing died down when interviews with Gray showed that Draper’s obesity was partially due to poverty. Gray worked an astronomical amount of hours to make ends meet and simply did not have time to cook. She brought fast food home because it was affordable and time saving. PETA responded by sending her a copy of Meatless Meals for Working People, a book that mostly contains lists of vegetarian items one can select at fast food places.

3. Westminster Kennel Club dog show protest

Someone at PETA sat up and said: “Hey, we haven’t pissed off anyone lately, what can we do that is terribly offensive?” The result was a bizarre protest at the 133rd annual Westminster Kennel Club dog show where protesters dressed as the KKK. You see, according to PETA’s logic, selective dog breeding is equivalent to the white supremacist ethnic purity stance that the KKK espouses. Protesters stood outside the show handing out leaflets, carrying signs, and generally being pleasant, except for dressing as one of the most violent and intolerant groups in history. Admittedly, some dog breeding can produce unpleasant and painful effects for the dogs in question, but the AKC doesn’t burn crosses or lynch mutts in the street for being impure. Fortunately for the forces of logic, no one seemed to get the point of the protest. According to the AP: “Most passers-by seemed more puzzled than offended”. In the end, no one really paid attention to the protesters, except as interesting curiosities, and PETA failed not only to spread awareness or help the cause of purebred dogs, but they failed to piss anyone off significantly.

4. Cooking Mama

Cooking Mama is your typically bizarre (yet fun) Nintendo game where the player “cooks” various meals using the Nintendo DS’s touch screen. The stylus is used to move objects around, chop veggies, and slice meat. PETA thought that the fun, E-rated game would be a great platform to protest eating meat from, so they released a Flash version of the game called Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals where the player prepares a turkey by plucking feathers, ripping out innards, and cutting its head off. The insane PETA version of the game is a lot more fun than the original, possibly because there is something viscerally exciting about tearing the insides out of a turkey and then eating it. Response to the “unauthorized” version of the game was small, limited only to gaming sites trying to figure out what PETA was trying to accomplish. Once again, people seemed more bemused and uncertain than shocked and offended by PETA’s actions, so it once again begs the question: what was PETA was trying to accomplish?

5. NASCAR chicken dance

NASCAR is an event best left alone unless you have a mullet. Its fans are strange, its appeal is… evasive, but thankfully it is mostly avoidable outside of certain sites beneath the Mason-Dixon line. That’s why the rest off the world ignores it when NASCAR fans attempt to break the world record for something. Unless, of course, you’re PETA, in which case, you protest it with vigor. KFC sponsored an attempt to break the world record for most people chicken dancing at a 2009 event at the Talledega Speedway. PETA immediately took issue with this harmless event. The reason? Failure to adopt “even modest human reforms” with regards to the care and treatment of KFC’s chickens. You would think that someone at PETA would have realized that protesting KFC directly would have been a better idea than a high-profile attack on a large event that was barely related to chickens to begin with. Again, no one really paid attention to the protest. NASCAR: 1, KFC: 0.

6. Holocaust on Your Plate

Unless you are a Holocaust denier, member of 4chan, or 4chan member who also happens to be a Holocaust denier, joking about the Holocaust is considered off limits. That is unless, you guessed it, you are PETA. They thought it would be appropriate to compare the raising and slaughter of farm animals to this rather unpleasant event in human history. While there are a thousand appropriate ways to make the comparison, PETA went balls to the wall inappropriate: PETA toured a giant display that consisted of eight 60-square-foot panels where chickens, cow, and pig carcasses were juxtaposed with photos of Holocaust victims. Genius. Once again, this action produced little but a resounding “What the fuck?” from the community at large, and several pissed off statements from Jews and actual Holocaust survivors.

7. Obama’s fly swat

In mid-2009, Obama swatted down a fly during an interview with CNBC. “That was pretty impressive, wasn’t it? I got the sucker,” Obama riffed. Not even Birthers found issue with the event outside of the press fawning over his lighting fast reflexes. A few blogs decided that this was something PETA had to do something about. Falling for the troll bait, PETA found it inexcusable. They declared it an “execution” and demanded that Obama show a little more compassion to even “the least sympathetic animals.” The declaration largely became fodder to make fun of PETA so they backpedaled a bit and released the following statement: “In a nutshell, our position is this: He isn’t the Buddha, he’s a human being, and human beings have a long way to go before they think before they act.” They then sent him a “humane” flytrap.

8. WoW seal clubbing

World of Warcraft can quickly turn into a grinding process to level up and generally become a neckbeard. Players find inventive ways to combat the boredom and entertain themselves such as raiding in game funerals. One of the most popular pastimes is slaughtering a server’s wildlife for shits and giggles. A few Canadian players decided to host an in game seal hunt and PETA flipped a wig when they found out about it. While the slaughter of actual seals is frowned upon by the general public because baby seals are adorable, WoW seals aren’t real so no one really cares if they are attacked. So instead of directly protesting groups that club seals in Canada, PETA decided to raid the event because it would somehow open the eyes of Canadians who supported the killing of cute pups. Again, no one really seemed to care.

9. PETA’s lobster nightmare

Only poor coastal Americans ate lobster before lobster houses started opening up in-land. Americans couldn’t boil enough of the little crustaceans and fishermen almost wiped out the population to meet demand. These days, the “poor man’s chicken” enjoys a gourmet status and is often used in fundraisers, much like the one that the Child and Family Resources holds each year. In 2009, PETA arranged for the Child and Family Resources to use the “humane” $3,500 CrustaStun, which electrocutes the lobsters in less than a second. They flew in the inventor and generally acted smug until disaster struck: the machines didn’t arrive in time so the agency decided to boil the 1,800 lobsters instead. “It’s a total nightmare,” said a spokesperson for PETA.