It’s possible the good people at PETA — People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals — have seen the movie “Groundhog Day” one too many times.

The Bill Murray classic features a Pittsburgh weatherman who journeys to the frozen hamlet of Punxsutawney for the annual rite where a groundhog emerges and predicts the weather. See a shadow, get six more weeks of winter. No shadow, and spring is around the corner.

Yet things go wrong for Murray when a time loop traps him in the day over and over and over. Entertainment website WhatCulture.com estimated it took just shy of 34 years’ worth of Groundhog Days for the endless Feb. 2 cycle to be broken.

PETA is making us all relive that.

On Tuesday, PETA once again proposed a way to get rid of Groundhog Day. Let’s replace Punxsutawney Phil with a golden coin. Flip it, and you have at least as good a chance at predicting spring as a prognosticating rodent.

Few people are going to argue that Phil is a stellar meteorologist. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration puts him on the money about 40% of the time. That’s all? Phil, you’ve literally got one job. Come on!

But the groundhog’s success rate is better than PETA’s. The animal rights organization has been banging this particular drum for years, with annual adjustments.

In 2023, it advocated for replacing Phil with a human groundhog. In 2022, it was a persimmon tree. Persimmon Day? Not sure about that. In 2021, the demand was to drag a real meteorologist out of a hole. In 2020, an animatronic groundhog with weather-predicting artificial intelligence was suggested. (That idea has actually been pitched since 2010.)

The suggestions are just part of the story. There have been other campaigns. Billboards have been erected in Punxsutawney. There was a suggestion to let a PETA member live in the enclosure where Phil and his companion, Phyllis, reside in the care of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club.

Animals should be humanely and ethically treated. Animals in the keeping of people need to be afforded respect and care.

But Pennsylvania is a state where groundhogs — also known as woodchucks — are not just an important part of the ecosystem. They’re also an abundant one. The groundhogs in the wild make up a considerable part of the state’s roadkill each spring and summer.

Phil and Phyllis don’t live in the wild. They live under the attention of a community that has built its entire identity around them. The state has even joined in, adopting the puppeted Gus, the Second Most Famous Groundhog in Pennsylvania, as a lottery mascot.

Repetition of a message is a time-honored way to reinforce what you want, continuing to hammer it home. But PETA isn’t accomplishing anything with its annual riff on the repeated theme.

No one else is agreeing with them. No one is jumping on the bandwagon. Does the press release get attention? Yes. But, like Murray’s movie, it’s a humorous holiday tradition.

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