According to this story Pamela Anderson has put up a Billboard accusing KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) of cruelty to animals.
Come on, Pamela. If your IQ were bigger than your bra size maybe you’d realize that choice of food groups is up to individuals. You don’t think eating chicken is a good thing. Fine. Don’t eat chicken. But why don’t you leave it to others to chose their own diet?
As far as dogs and cats go, there are some countries where they are still more likely to be considered as food than they are as pets. Why don’t you put your fucking billboard up in China?
Frankly, I think you’re pissed off at KFC because they get people interested in** their** breasts without resorting to silicone.
I have come here to defend Pamela Anderson. I must alert the Homeland Security Advisor because surely this is one of the Seven Signs of the Impending Apocalypse.
Yes, PETA has soiled their once fine reputation by morphing into nutwings. However, on some matters, they actually have a point. The conditions of chickens in poultry processing plants is one of them, IMO.
As an avowed omnivore, I don’t have one problem with people eating chicken. However, I don’t think that that gives us a license to treat these animals inhumanely. Keeping an animal in a cage barely big enough to contain the animal, let alone allow the animal to turn around in, as the big name poultry processors do, is a crappy way to treat these animals. Keeping an animal in a warehouse its entire life where it will never step foot on the ground let alone see the sun, is a crappy way to treat these animals. I think this kind of treatment is unethical and disgraceful.
Until these conditions change, I will pay the extra money and buy cage-free chicken and eggs. But I’m glad that there are organizations that publicize the treatment of these animals and put pressure on them to treat their animals more humanely. That, IMO, is a noble thing. So, in this particular case, I’ll admit that I actually agree with Anderson.
Abso-fucking-lutely. How ignorant do you have to be to confuse not eating meat with not eating meat that has been raised in extraordinarily inhumane conditions?
I agree with that, and I’m a vegetarian [somewhere, catsix feels judged and doesn’t know why ;)]. But I very much wish celebrity vegetarians would stop associating with PETA. It makes them look like morons, because obviously they (or their people) are not looking into PETA’s records: they have made plenty of outrageous statements and their leadership has made it clear they think it’s okay to use violence to support their cause, and it’s a matter of record that they give money to eco-terrorist groups. And the real problem is that it makes your average, run-of-the-mill non-radical vegetarian look like a hysterical idiot, which is where it really becomes my problem.
PETA’s shock tactics are responsible for bringing the talking point of poor conditions at factory farms into the mainstream, when generations of genteel, church-lady, white-glove activism accomplished less than nothing.
Pam Anderson may very well think that eating chicken is bad, but her campaign is directed towards KFC’s food farms and not specifically all meat eaters. It’s a free country etc. and celebrities can get involved in what they want, or not, and we are free to pay attention, or not.
I think I’ve read Ingrid Newkirk saying the exact same thing. The shock tactics are obnoxious and the worst type of stereotype-enforcing liberal whining and condescension. When they actually encourage and support violence, that’s not shock tactics, it’s terrorism. If they’ve accomplished some good - and I think they have - it’s entirely tangential to the goals of their leaders, which are really nuts.
I’m of the opinion that someone who sleeps with both Tommy Lee and Kid Rock has little room in the “you’re putting dangerous things in your body” debate. :dubious:
Pam’s also a dope if she thinks KFC has more than fuck-all to do with raising chickens.
The KFC corporation (which is part of PepsiCo isn’t it?) doesn’t actually raise chickens at all, it buys already dead birds from poultry farms.
They have as much to do with raising chickens as McDonald’s does with raising beef cattle or as Subway does with growing lettuce.
Of course the animals we eat shouldn’t be tortured their entire lives, I don’t think anybody’s advocating that they should be. But PETA uses, and Pam apparently supports, some pretty nasty and distasteful tactics (like comparing the lives of chickens on poultry farms to the Holocaust) in order to try to make an overblown case for the point that people aren’t disgreeing with.
Can anyone point out one of these farms where these horrific abuses are happening? A name, something, other than ‘they exist and KFC uses them and they’re really bad’?
You might not like all of PETA’s tactics (i don’t, and i’ve been critical of them on these boards), but the comfortable obliviousness with which so many people go about their daily lives means that sometimes you need to make a scene in order to be heard.
I’m pretty sure Pam is referring to a video that was shot in one of KFC’s factories of workers beating chickens and slamming them up against a brick wall.
I’m not even a vegetarian, but I still think that’s pretty sick. I can see why animal rights people might be up in arms.
So we there were 11 employees, the Reuters article doesn’t state that it was farm policy to engage in this behavior, and those employees (out of how big an operation, they don’t say) fired and possibly facing criminal charges over their behavior.
The company that owns the poultry farm is investigating now that these abuses have been brought to the light of the corporate headquarters, and this is an example of ‘institutionalized cruelty’?
Hey, I despise PETA, but I’m glad these assholes got caught abusing the chickens. I think they deserved to be fired and to face whatever criminal penalties come their way. I don’t, however, see too much evidence that this abuse was corporate policy.
Were those employees acting in the manner in which they were trained? Is there any evidence of that?
You’re joking, surely? If KFC purchase their birds from farms with dubious practices, they are supporting such practices. If they refused to do so, such practices would be somewhat less likely to exist. If everybody refused to, the practices wouldn’t exist at all. By drawing attention to the fact that KFC are endorsing the practices, Pam encourages people to boycott KFC until they refuse to trade with such farms, leading to the positive consequences above. It’s consumer power in action. How is that being a dope?
Ah – at last, some sense. Although for the opposite reason you seem to think.
Really? You seem to endorse sticking your head in the sand and ignoring such abuses, which is a tacit endorsement and allows them to continue. As evidenced by…
You asked for an example, and i gave you one. Of course there’s no evidence that such treatment was company policy; do you really think they’re going to send out memos saying “Please stomp the chickens”?
Ever occur to you that, as long as the money was rolling in, the company might just have adopted a head-in-the-sand attitude to what the practices at its chicken processing plants actually were? Corporations are always willing to investigate this type of thing “now that these abuses have been brought to light,” because any other response to such cruelty would be extremely bad PR. If they really gave a fuck about what was going on, they would have had mechanisms in place to ensure that this sort of shit didn’t happen in the first place.
kabbes, are any of your cites not from groups or individuals who are obviously biased in terms of animal rights?
I’d like to see some independent proof that these farms are as common as the activists claim.
So should everyone just take PETA at their word?
And if it’s proven that they knew about it and allowed or encouraged it, I’ll be just as pissed off as you. But it hasn’t been proven that they even knew it was going on at all.
Is it possible to eliminate every bad employee beforehand? Eleven out of how many employees nationwide were a problem? How many employees were on that particular farm? I’m not about to excuse what they did. What I’m saying is that there’s no independent evidence that I’ve ever seen that these problems are as widespread as PETA would like people to believe.
Actually, that is not necessarily true. KFC and McDonalds, by virtue of being mega-consumers, can exercise tremendous influence over their suppliers. Wal-mart is a very good example of a corporation that demands that it’s suppliers comply with their needs. If KFC were to say unless you do X Y and Z, we will not buy your chickens. I would wager that the poultry producer will at least make a show of doing just that and if pushed would do so.