PETA Faces Backlash After Using Umamusume: Pretty Derby in Activism Post
- Sagar Mankar
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
PETA’s latest attempt at raising awareness has sparked controversy in the gaming community after the organization referenced Umamusume: Pretty Derby in a December 11 post.
The nonprofit shared an image titled “If Umamusume: Pretty Derby was Honest,” showing Silence Suzuka, one of the game’s characters, with a broken leg.
While the intent was presumably to highlight the suffering of real racehorses, the execution has been met with widespread backlash from fans.
Silence Suzuka, like other “horse girls” in Cygames’s popular title, is based on a real Japanese racehorse. The original horse was celebrated for its victories on the JRA circuit before suffering a fatal injury that led to euthanasia. PETA’s post directly referenced this history, stating, “If Umamusume: Pretty Derby were honest, your favorite horse girl doesn’t get a comeback arc. One failed event, and the race is over forever—just like what happened to the real Silence Suzuka.”
The accompanying image showed Suzuka crying in pain with a visibly broken leg, a depiction many fans criticized as sensationalized and disrespectful.
The backlash was swift. Players accused PETA of downplaying a tragic story and misusing Cygames’s intellectual property. Some even banded together to mass report the post to Cygames, citing violations of the company’s strict guidelines on derivative works. These rules are designed to protect the reputations of the real horses and maintain Cygames’s partnerships with owners and organizations such as the Japan Racing Association. Violent or gory depictions, as well as using characters to promote specific ideologies, are explicitly forbidden, making PETA’s post a likely breach of those terms.
Beyond the issue of guidelines, fans expressed concern that the incident could damage Cygames’s relationships with stakeholders, potentially jeopardizing the future of Umamusume: Pretty Derby. Many also pointed out that the criticism felt misplaced, as Cygames has previously donated and raised funds to support the care of both active and retired racehorses.
This isn’t the first time PETA and the gaming community have crossed paths. The organization has a long history of targeting video games to push its animal rights agenda. In the past, they criticized Far Cry 6 for including a cockfighting minigame, arguing that it trivialized animal cruelty. The group demanded Ubisoft remove the feature, though many players saw it as a cultural reference rather than an endorsement of real-world practices.
PETA has also created its own satirical browser games to parody popular titles. These included Pokémon Black and Blue, which depicted Pokémon fighting against abusive trainers, and spoofs of Cooking Mama, Super Mario Bros., and Super Meat Boy.
More recently, PETA even took aim at Nintendo’s Mario Kart World, criticizing the design of a cow character for wearing a nose ring, which they claimed was painful and exploitative.
Source: Automaton