PETA’S ‘Bloody Bucket’ Turns Kfc Icon Into An Educational Toy

Messages and Images Show That KFC Takes Chickens From Shell to Hell

For Immediate Release:
22 April 2004

Contact:
Andrew Butler 020 7357 9229, ext 230
Dawn Carr 020 7357 9229, ext 224

London – Holding signs reading, ‘The Colonel’s Secret Recipe: Live Scalding, Painful Debeaking, Crippled Chickens’, PETA members will hand out ‘Bloody Buckets’ – containers mimicking KFC’s iconic buckets, filled with ‘bones’, ‘feathers’, an evil ‘Col Sanders’ figure, a plastic chicken with her throat slit, and lots of fake blood – to kids at KFC locations, starting next week in Edinburgh and Norwich. The ‘Bloody Buckets’ are the latest salvo in PETA’s international campaign against KFC suppliers’ farming and slaughter abuses.

PETA attempted to work with executives of KFC’s parent company, Yum! Brands, prior to launching its ‘KFC Cruelty’ Campaign, but despite assurances made long ago by Senior Vice President Jonathan Blum that KFC would ‘raise the bar’ on animal welfare, the company refuses to eliminate the worst abuses. 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.

PETA is calling on KFC to make basic improvements based on the best available scientific research and the recommendations of KFC’s own animal-welfare advisory panel. Undercover investigations into KFC suppliers in Germany, India, the US and Australia have turned up exactly the same abuses as were found in the UK: crippled chickens living in crowded, filthy conditions. The Sunday Mirror led a report on an investigation by Norfolk-based Hillside Animal Sanctuary into a UK KFC supplier with the headline ‘Distressed and Dying in a Cramped Shed … Nobody Does Chicken Like KFC’.

‘KFC stands for cruelty in our book’, says PETA Director Dawn Carr. ‘If KFC executives treated cats or dogs the way they treat chickens, they could go to prison for cruelty to animals.’

For more information, please visit PETA’s Web site KFCCruelty.co.uk. High-resolution images of the ‘Bloody Bucket’ are available on request.

#