Besides being one of the more annoying things one can encounter on the road, being behind a chicken truck is also disturbing.
Piles of cages fly down the road with a trail of feathers in their wake. Chickens might be scared then (think about how it would feel if we were getting our hairs ripped out one by one), but they have no idea what lies ahead of them.
Kentucky Fried Chicken is one of the top offenders in chicken cruelty. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has a campaign against KFC and its parent company, Yum! Brands.
“McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s responded to consumer pressure and KFC would do well to follow their lead,” PETA director Bruce Friedrich said Friday.
A spokeswoman for KFC headquarters refused to respond directly to the criticisms. She accused PETA of engaging in a “misinformation campaign” aimed at establishing a “vegetarian world.”
Granted, PETA can go too far with its protests. They plan to picket the Louisville, Ky., church attended by David Novak, the chief executive officer of Yum! Brands. They plan to project slaughterhouse videotapes on big screen TVs outside.
Two PETA activists picketed a KFC restaurant in Reno Friday with signs reading, “KFC slits open live animals’ throats” and “The Colonel’s secret recipe: Live scalding, painful debeaking, crippled chickens.”
PETA gets a bad reputation because of their tactics, but many members of PETA are rational people who want to call attention to a problem unknown to many Americans. Just because PETA is often unorthodox doesn’t mean that their message should be disregarded.
“I’m still trying to figure out why the media continues to cover these people when all they do is push for a vegetarian world. All they want to do is get people to stop eating meat and poultry,” a KFC spokesperson said.
The feud between PETA and KFC continues while the chickens continue to suffer.
PETA’s Web site for this campaign, www.kfccruelty.com, states that KFC chickens are “given barely even room to move (each bird lives in the amount of space equivalent to a standard sheet of paper)” and that they “routinely suffer broken bones from being bred to be top heavy, from callous handling (workers roughly grab birds by their legs and stuff them into crates) and from being shackled upside down at slaughterhouses.”
PETA also claims the chickens are “often still fully conscious as their throats are cut or when they are dumped into tanks of scalding hot water to remove their feathers.”
PETA’s campaign needs to address another issue-the chicken truck. Current transport methods do not take into consideration the comfort of the chickens.
Chicken cages need to be covered to reduce the airflow directly slamming into the chickens.
Friedrich stated, “If they treated a dog or cat the way they treat their chickens, they would be in jail for felony treatment of animals in 40 states.”
Though most of us would probably rank dogs and cats higher on our list of animals for which we hold affection, chickens have feelings, social structure and intelligence, just like our household companions.
Bonnie Warschauer, a corporate spokeswoman for KFC, said the company is proud of its animal welfare guidelines.
According to www.kfc.com, KFC adopted an animal welfare policy in 2000 and again this past May. It’s a step in the right direction, but many of these anti-cruelty guidelines are vague, and it’s not easy to enforce vague policies.
I eat meat. I like chicken. I know there is no good way to kill something, but there is no excuse for torturing chickens.
If KFC is concerned about the welfare of the chickens it uses, then they need to write guidelines for their suppliers that plainly and specifically outline their expectations regarding the humane treatment of chickens.
Jana Hatcher is a junior political science and psychology major. She can be reached at [email protected].