Animal rights organisation People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) criticized Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag for the inclusion of whaling, saying that it is “disgraceful” for a video game to “glorify” whaling. An official PETA statement read, “Whaling—that is, shooting whales with harpoons and leaving them to struggle for an hour or more before they die or are hacked apart while they are still alive—may seem like something out of the history books, but this bloody industry still goes on today in the face of international condemnation, and it’s disgraceful for any game to glorify it. PETA encourages video game companies to create games that celebrate animals—not games that promote hurting and killing them.”^[21][22]

In response, Ubisoft stated that they did not condone “illegal whaling” any more than they condoned “a pirate lifestyle”.^[22]