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KFC Does Chickens Wrong

Ever since January 7, 2003, when People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the world's largest animal rights organization, launched an international campaign to end the extreme cruelty to chickens killed for KFC restaurants, more and more consumers have been questioning whether or not we have the right to treat chickens in any way we please.

Although most people don't know chickens as well as they know dogs and cats, these gentle birds can feel happiness, loneliness, fear, and pain, just the same. They are social, intelligent, and, according to Chris Evans, who studies animal behavior and communication at Macquarie University in Australia, have cognitive abilities "beyond the capacity of small children." The PBS documentary The Natural History of the Chicken revealed that chickens like to watch television and have vision similar to humans. A recent study by the Biophysics Group at Silsoe Research Institute in England found that chickens can anticipate the future and demonstrate self-control.

In their natural surroundings, chickens spend their day foraging for food, making nests, roosting in trees, and taking sun and dust baths. They exist in stable social groups and can recognize each other by their facial features. Like us, chickens form strong family ties and mourn when they lose a loved one. A mother hen will turn her eggs as many as five times an hour and cluck to her unborn chicks, who will chirp back to her and to one another.

Chickens are just as deserving of compassion and respect as dogs, cats, and other animals are. Yet the 850 million chickens killed for KFC each year are crammed by the tens of thousands into sheds that stink of ammonia fumes from accumulated waste. They don't have enough room to stretch even one wing.

They have their sensitive beaks seared off with hot blades and routinely suffer broken bones from being bred to be top heavy, from callous handling when workers roughly grab birds by their legs and stuff them into crates, and from being shackled upside-down at slaughterhouses.

By the time the birds are old enough for slaughter, their bodies are so fragile that their bones break when they are grabbed and stuffed into crates for transport. During slaughter, their throats are cut and they are often dumped into a tank of scalding water while they're still conscious.

As the leader in the chicken industry, KFC has the responsibility to ensure that chickens raised for its buckets are protected from the worst abuses.

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