Chicken or Kingfisher? PETA Points Out There’s No Difference by Serving Up Bird ‘Wings’

8 January 2025

Shrewsbury – If you wouldn’t eat the wings of a swan or kingfisher, why eat a chicken’s wings? That’s the food for thought PETA supporters dished out this Veganuary in Shrewsbury, County Shropshire, which is home to one of the densest concentrations of intensive chicken farms in Europe – a major contributor to deadly river pollution and wildlife destruction. The display featured a full “menu” of bird-based “dishes”, including kingfisher, heron, swan, and cormorant – locally sourced, of course.

More images and footage are available here and here.

“Chickens recognise their friends, talk to their unhatched babies, and fiercely defend their chicks, and they don’t want to be sliced up and eaten any more than kingfishers, swans, or we do,” says PETA Senior Campaigns Manager Kate Werner. “Pollution from massive chicken farms is poisoning the River Wye and Severn, and in turn river birds, so PETA urges anyone horrified by the thought of killing kingfishers and crows to do all birds a favour by leaving animals off their plates.”

Chickens can distinguish among the faces of more than 100 other chickens and communicate with at least 24 unique vocalisations, each with a distinct meaning. Like swans and many other wild birds, they roost together and have complex social hierarchies. Yet chickens killed for their flesh are crammed by the tens of thousands into filthy sheds, where they’re forced to live in their own waste – and the runoff from these operations pollutes the environment and poisons local wildlife, including kingfishers. At slaughterhouses, chickens’ throats are often cut while they’re still conscious, and many are scalded to death in de-feathering tanks.

PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow the group on Facebook, X, TikTok, or Instagram.

Contact:

Lucy Watson +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]

#