PETA is up in arms over purported animal cruelty featured in the hottest shooters on the market, Battlefield 3.

PETA Germany issued a statement condemning developers for including content featuring animal cruelty. PETA claims that killing of virtual animals can promote brutal behavior and impact the young audience. Shooting people in the face apparently won’t produce the same results.

So what has PETA so upset this time around? Is there some sort of hidden sadistic mod that allows gamers to slaughter virtual bunnies and puppies, or do something truly unspeakable to goats? Not really, PETA was offended by a single scene in the game, which depicts a rat being stabbed by a combat knife and thrown away “like garbage”. PETA believes that such brutality could make people consider violence against other people as well. Once again, we are talking about Battlefield 3. Violence against other people is sort of the whole point of the game. Violence against animals is another thing altogether – that’s Angry Birds, not Battlefield.

This is not the first time PETA chose to piggyback controversial issues to get its point across and spread its radical “total animal liberation” agenda. In the past PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk wrote to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to protest the use of a donkey as a crude bomb delivery system. The use of actual people as suicide bombers and the fate of their victims did not seem to faze PETA too much. In addition, PETA ran a highly controversial, and some might argue very offensive campaign comparing the industrial slaughter of chicken to the Holocaust.

You can check out the full statement here.