Real-Life Game of Angry Birds Is An Act of Animal Cruelty

Recently, some children in Shaanxi Province in North-Western China were caught playing the popular mobile game Angry Birds in a local park. Sounds innocent right? Wrong. This real-life game of Angry Birds had the kids strapping captured sparrows to fireworks, and setting them off.

The school-aged children involved in this vicious game of animal torture reportedly used slingshots to knock out or kill the birds, so they could then capture them, strap them to live fireworks, and set them off. The end results were not in favor of the poor feathered fellows. Thankfully, Huang Chu, 45, who happened to be passing by at the time of the incident, saw the children running away from something, and upon further investigation, found an injured sparrow strapped to the underside of an unexploded firework.

“I realised it was not going to go off as the fuse had run out, but when I went to walk past it I saw there was a sparrow tied to the side of the firework. I took a picture and then I set it free, and it flapped off under a bush.”

After the dazed-but-alive bird fluttered off, Huang Chu found the mutilated bodies of several other birds who weren’t quite as lucky. According to other park-goers that Chu spoke with, the boys had been setting off the Angry Bird inspired pyrotechnics all morning, “‘I spoke to an older boy who told me that the others had been playing Angry Birds, shooting the fireworks across the park and pretending to be playing the video game of the same name.” Chu is now asking that authorities toughen up their stance on, and enforcement of China’s animal protection laws.

Angry Birds, which was created by Rovio Entertainment, a Finnish video game developer, involves using an oversized slingshot to hurl birds of varying abilities at pigs with differing levels of strength. The aim is to rid the level of pigs before running out of birds. The addictive game was first introduced to the iPhone App Store in December of 2009, and by October of 2010 it had already been downloaded 12 million times. Since its inception, Angry Birds has seen a number of just-as-popular sequels and spin-offs, including collaborations with other well-known franchises like Star Wars and The Transformers. An animated television series based on the video game franchise debuted in 2013, and a 3D-animated feature length movie is in the works, and is set to hit theatres in 2016.

[Photo Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]

[Image Credit: The Daily Mail]