There's not a single person here on the side of PETA? Fine. As an old-timer who's been spending his allowance on everything from Nintendo for more than thirty years and also as a vegan, I guess I'll jump in.

Factory farms are the worst, and that's where almost all milk comes from. Horrible things are done to animals so that milk and cheese and everything with dairy in it (read: almost everything) is cheap. The romanticized family farm is pretty much dead, and this game – innocuous as it may seem – perpetuates this idealized version of dairy farming. Sure, it's only one small game in a large collection of games, and it's not even a very good part of the game. But it's there, and it hides the animal cruelty that comes with dairy farming.

PETA makes videos, like this one, to show these injustices. People who drink milk and eat products with dairy in it don't usually want to see this stuff, because if they do, they'll feel guilty about not doing anything. Most people won't change and they'll continue to eat what they grew up eating, and they won't even think about how the sausage is made. And then there's the bought-and-paid-for politicians who pass "ag-gag" laws so that hidden-camera footage like the kind that PETA captures is actually illegal.

PETA has no delusions about Nintendo caving to their demands. This is just a small part of their campaign to end animal cruelty, and despite what some here are claiming, this little letter isn't going to stop them from doing a bunch of other things. Whenever there's an opportunity to capture headlines somewhere, they'll take it. And silly as this campaign may seem to you, it's already succeeding. I've read this site for years, and I see now that there have been a few posts in the past about PETA, but this is the first article that I've come across dealing with animal cruelty. The comments here are packed with haters, but I bet it got a few people to watch some of their videos. Maybe somebody was thinking about giving up dairy, and this was the last straw for them. If that's the case, then great. Or maybe this campaign or article caused a young person to think about where milk comes from for the first time. Maybe this whole thing planted a seed and they'll eventually see that we're now swimming in dairy-free alternatives, and they'll someday become a vegan.

Most people aren't born vegan, at least not yet, and I certainly wasn't. I used to crack jokes about PETA, too, and I routinely skipped their videos. At first I didn't care. Then I realized that they probably had a point, and I didn't want to see what was really happening, because I didn't want to make some difficult changes. I didn't want to see myself as a hypocrite. And then, after passing on their videos for maybe a hundred times, I started to watch them. And you know what? They're effective. Eventually I came around, and look at me now, preaching on a gaming blog to a hostile crowd.

Giving up meat is easy. Meat, like obscenity, is easy to spot; You know it when you see it. Giving up dairy, though, that's a million times harder. It's in almost everything, and you often can't tell if something is dairy-free just by looking at it. You have to read the ingredients, or you have to ask people who don't know what they're selling or serving, and it's pretty much a pain. It's a pain, but it's possible, and now when I watch their videos, I feel only sadness. I used to feel sad and guilty, but thankfully that's behind me now. I used to be part of the problem, but now I'm just the annoying guy preaching to a bunch of people who don't want to make any changes. For that, I'm sorry.

As for PETA? Kudos for an interesting little letter. Maybe it'll get some people thinking.