PETA has almost singlehandedly put animal rights on the map. It's an in-your-face organization with very thick skin that never gives up on changing public attitudes about animals and how we should treat them. Nevertheless, there is one thing about PETA that I can't accept: its increasingly welfarist stand on issues like the treatment of animals killed for the fast food industry.

KFC is a case in point. After achieving some success with getting Wendy's, Burger King and McDonald's to adopt animal welfare standards, PETA in 2001 presented KFC with a list of five requests: 1) adopt an "Animal Care Standards" program that would improve the living conditions in chicken sheds, 2) use controlled-atmosphere killing (CAK) so that the birds would be dead before their throats were slit or their bodies were scalded for defeathering, 3) use mechanized chicken gathering instead of employing factory-farm workers to roughly throw them into transport crates, 4) no more breeding for rapid growth and force-feeding drugs, 5) make welfare standards transparent and verifiable.

As of this date, KFC has refused to comply with any of the above items despite an aggressive PETA Kentucky Fried Cruelty campaign that continues to this day. PETA has enlisted distinguished celebrities like the Dalai Lama and Cornell West, and welfare experts like Dr. Temple Grandin, to try to get KFC to change its tune regarding the well-documented cruelty of its suppliers to farmed chickens. It has sent frequent letters and met with the executives of the parent company, Yum! Brands, as well as with KFC, and attended countless stockholder meetings to try to get basic welfare policies adopted. KFC at one point insisted that it was developing animal welfare standards and even put the false information on its website about them, but in reality it wasn't doing anything to improve the lives of its farmed animals.

I've participated in a number of PETA-sponsored fast food protests, including a few for KFC. Although there is nothing wrong with trying to get fast food corporations to use suppliers that treat their animals well, it's my feeling that giving fast food companies too much credit if they do something as insignificant as increasing the cage size of farmed chickens by a few inches or using a more "humane" method to kill them is only enabling the abuses of factory farming to continue.

I think the emphasis, for animal rights organizations like PETA, should be on encouraging the public to stop buying fast food from these places and to adopt vegetarianism or veganism as a more humane and healthier diet. At the very least, they should encourage consumers to purchase meat from free-range or compassionately raised animalsl Consumers should not be wasting their money, enriching unethical bad companies like Yum! Brands, and contributing to animal abuse by patronizing fast food outlets. KFC knows that it can string PETA along forever and never adopt any of its proposed minimal welfare standards, and my guess is that, sadly, it will.

http://www.kentuckyfriedcruelty.com

Learn more about this author, Ardeth Baxter.
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