Newcastle: Slaughtered ‘Chickens’ On Display For Anniversary Of Kfc Boycott

Local Demo One of Hundreds Worldwide in PETA’s ‘Week of Action’ Against KFC Farming and Slaughter Abuses

For Immediate Release:
13 January 2005

Contact:
Sean Gifford 020 7357 9229, ext. 226
Eileen Kinghorn 0771 729 8947

Newcastle – Holding signs that read, “The Colonel’s Secret Recipe: Live Scalding, Painful Debeaking, Crippled Chickens” and displaying a line of bloody strung-up chickens, protesters who want humane farming and killing reforms will gather in front of a local KFC restaurant as part of a worldwide series of demonstrations against the abusive treatment of chickens by KFC’s suppliers. The protest marks the second anniversary of PETA’s international boycott of the company, which has involved more than 5,000 demonstrations around the world and will include hundreds more during this week’s “International Week of Action”: 

Date: Friday, 14 January
Time: 12 noon
Place: KFC, 136-138 Northumberland Street

Despite assurances made long ago by Senior Vice President Jonathan Blum that KFC would “raise the bar” on animal welfare, the company still has not eliminated even the worst abuses. Seinfeld star and ex-KFC pitchman Jason Alexander had his contract with KFC cancelled after PETA enlisted him to speak to company chiefs about the suffering of chickens. Other high-profile support for the PETA campaign against KFC has come from Nobel Peace Prize winner His Holiness the Dalai Lama, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, rock icons Sir Paul McCartney and Chrissie Hynde, actors Pamela Anderson and Bea Arthur and bands Ash, Black Eyed Peas, and The Darkness.

KFC lags far behind one of its chief competitors, McDonald’s, which is actively exploring a more humane chicken-slaughter technology—controlled-atmosphere killing—that PETA is calling on KFC to implement along with other basic welfare reforms based on the best available scientific research and the recommendations of members of KFC’s own animal welfare advisory panel. Undercover investigations have turned up exactly the same abuses that KFC denies having to address—including crippled chickens kept in crowded, filthy conditions and sadistically tortured. The Sunday Mirror led a report on an investigation into a UK KFC supplier with the headline “Distressed and Dying in a Cramped Shed … Nobody Does Chicken Like KFC”.

“KFC is wilfully allowing chickens to be treated in ways that would make most people lose their lunch”, says PETA Europe n Campaigns Sean Gifford. “Anyone who eats at fast-food restaurants has the power to persuade KFC to change its ways by refusing to eat at KFC until chickens receive better treatment.”

For more information, please visit PETA’s Web site KentuckyFriedCruelty.co.uk.

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