UPDATE (8:50AM) – PETA has sent President Obama a “humane fly catcher” in response to his swatting of a pesky fly during an interview earlier this week. Seriously.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA, duh) has found yet another banal activity to get their panties in a bunch about; the tossing of dead fish, err, sea kittens. Seattle’s famous Pike Place Market, home to just about every kind of shop you can imagine, is most known for the fish mongers who toss fish from one end of their counter to another to the delight of slack-jawed onlookers. PETA thinks that this is just beyond the pale.

“Killing animals so you can toss their bodies around for amusement is just twisted,”

Actually, it’s not. The fish-tossers are very good at their job and the fish tend to have a flat flight pattern that rarely causes the fish to twist and tumble in the air. Anyway, the fish are already dead. Shouldn’t PETA be more worried about the precious fish- sorry again, sea kittens- that are still alive? Apparently not.

“And it particularly sends a terrible message to the public when vets call it fun to toss around the corpses of animals. If anyone should be promoting compassion and not callousness toward animals, it should be vets.”

Oh yeah, the vets thing. The biggest concern of the PETA people is that the good folks at the Pike Place Fish Market are putting on a flying-fish exhibition at an upcoming veterinary conference. I don’t exactly see how the two are linked, myself, but it’s fish that they’re throwing, not puppies or kittens or gerbils (although I would pay good money to see that done, with live pets, of course).

In any case, it’s doubtful that the Pike Place Fish Market will be changing it’s ways any time soon. The market brings 10 million visitors every year. That’s a lot of people who enjoy seeing dead fish fly through the air before being wrapped up, taken home and cooked to utter deliciousness on a grill. PETA, meanwhile, has only 12,000 or so supporters in the campaign to save the “sea kittens.”