Blackburn: Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road? To Protest Kfc Cruelty, Of Course!

Group to Use Eye-Catching Tactics to Turn Customers Away from KFC

For Immediate Release:
19 March 2004

Contact:
Andrew Butler 020 7357 9229 ext 230; 0779 344 4020 (mobile)
Dawn Carr 020 7357 9229, ext 224

Blackburn – The shocking video images of suffering chickens will be inescapable – they’ll be shown on ‘body-screen’ TVs worn by activists and accompanied by placards reading, ‘The Colonel’s Secret Recipe: Live Scalding, Painful Debeaking, Crippled Chickens’, as angry members of PETA protest the reprehensible abuse of chickens by KFC’s suppliers at a local KFC restaurant. A giant, crippled ‘chicken’ will hobble across the road in front of the restaurant, while pamphleteers urge customers to eat elsewhere:

Date:  Saturday, 20 March
Time:  12 noon to 1 p.m.
Place: KFC, 59 King William St

Undercover investigations into KFC suppliers in the U.S., Germany, India, England and Australia have all revealed the same abuses: crippled chickens living in crowded, filthy conditions. 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’. PETA’s recommended changes are based on the scientific work of KFC’s own animal-welfare advisors and would eliminate only the worst abuses.

Among PETA’s minimal demands are that KFC stop breeding and drugging animals so that they become crippled under their own weight or suffer from heart failure or lung collapse, stop slaughtering animals in a manner that causes many to be scalded to death or drowned in feather-removal tanks and stop gathering chickens in a manner that breaks millions of the animals’ wings and legs.

High-profile support for PETA’s campaign has come from Justin Hawkins of The Darkness, Pamela Anderson, the Black Eyed Peas, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, Sir Paul McCartney and Chrissie Hynde, among others. More than 2,000 protests against KFC have taken place around the world so far.

‘KFC stands for cruelty in our book’, says PETA Director Dawn Carr. ‘Nearly 750 million chickens are killed each year for KFC in the cruellest ways imaginable, yet KFC has refused to do anything whatsoever to eliminate the worst abuses that these animals suffer.’

For more information, please visit KentuckyFriedCruelty.co.uk.

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