To the contrary! A bumbling oafishness that sometimes makes the team look bad to outsiders is a core tank trope and a common recipe for initiating encounters. And Taunt is a cornerstone of the tank kit.

Seriously though, PETA doesn't make other vegan activists look any worse than animal ag propaganda already does. A lot of money goes into making vegans look bad.

It's not really that complicated a strategy for a large, well-financed team of full time activists to produce, and really it's within a genre of "leveraging propagandized outrage" shock activism seen more frequently in the past decade from larger advocacy groups. Like those incidents of people vandalizing art with soup, or pouring products on the ground in grocery stores, or painting monuments. It generates outrage, that outrage garauntees wide news coverage, that wide news coverage reaches and activates 100x or 1000x the number of fresh new activists that traditional advocacy acts might, making the media-directed vitreol of millions who will forget and move on within a week fantastically worthwhile. It basically taps into the power of existing propaganda against a movement, using it to ultimately drive interest in the movement. I forget where I was reading an interview with a Greenpeace leader, about how they simply couldn't pass on these tactics because of how effective they are, and they arrived at that conclusion not by prediction but by experience.