What is PETA’s actual goal with regards to KFC then? I can’t believe for a minute that if KFC were to try to placate PETA, that the demands wouldn’t change.
Ingrid Newkirk is too freaking insane to ever stop putting pressure on KFC and McDonald’s. After all, it was PETA who terrorized kids by handing out ‘UnHappy Meals’.
You’re really not going to believe me that most of our poultry is factory farmed? Just because the cites are from groups that are seeking to highlight that most of our poultry is factory farmed? Why would they be expending the effort to stop factory farming if farms weren’t factory farming? You really think that the likes of the RNZSPCA are that unreliable?
Even in the unlikely case that 85% is an exaggeration, suppose that it were half that. Is it acceptable to you for 42.5% of all chickens to be reared in this way?
Look at the quoted paragraph. It details legal acceptablility for battery cages. Do you suppose that battery farms are better than the minimum standards? How much better? How much better would be acceptable to you? How do these two things compare?
Sigh. You really are determined to keep your head in that sand.
OK then, try The Daily Telegraph. As of mid-June 2002, they stated that 70% of hens are kept in battery cages. I suppose you’re going to tell me that they have some kind of ulterior motive too, despite the fact that the tone of the article is against banning the cages.
And this article further states that just giving hens a third more nest space than the legal minumum plus a simple nest box, perch and litter will add a staggering 25% to the price of eggs. That tells its story about the way that those hens are currently being kept.
Face it. The vast majority of hens are kept in battery cages in the legally mandated minimum requirements detailed in my earlier links. To think otherwise is just to stick your fingers in your ears and shut your eyes.
pan
I forgot to mention – the Telegraph article uses as its source the British Egg Council themselves. Is that reliable enough for you?
Its motivation is the fact that as of 2012, existing cages will be illegal in the EU. Instead, things will be marginally better with the aforementioned extra 33% space etc.
This ruling will not affect the US, who will be able to merrily carry on using the cages as before.
pan
I think it’s more or less that I would like to see source material and corroboration for the claims posted on their sites, as in where they got the numbers they posted, because I have had much exposure to animal rights groups that use sensationalism and shock while lacking in the bibliography.
Well that’s certainly more reliable than an animal liberation group, at least in my opinion. Opinions seem to vary as to the actual changes needed, with some of the more extreme groups and some of the more moderate, as well as the opinions of farmers themselves.
Would I be willing to pay 25% more for a dozen eggs if that’d result in reasonably humane enviornments for the chickens? Yeah, OK, I could get on board with that. Some of the more extreme positions, I don’t know.
What started out as a bleary-eyed 1 a.m. rant has tuned into an interesting thread. I wasn’t able to play the video you provided, mhendo, but the Reuters backstory didn’t llook to me like an indictment of the whole pouiltry industry as much as an expose of eleven individuals in a company whose total number of employees Reuters didn’t report.
As far as the description small cages for numerous birds is concerned, I have to admit that I’ve seen chickens being transported on flatbed trucks. There were hundreds of wire cages stacked several deep and packed so full of live chickens that they couldn’t move inside them. I assumed these birds were being transported to a facility where they would be processed. I know this may seem cruel to some, but I ask you, what would you have the processers do? If they transported one or two chickens per cage nobody would ever be able to afford to eat chicken again. I’m sure to vegans like Pamela Anderson and terrorist wackos like PETA would be happy with that result. But since chicken is pretty much a staple of the American diet (most people are not as “civilized” as those morally superior vegans and PETA members, after all) it is unlikely that they are going to give up chicken for tofu.
I’m all for punishing individuals who abuse animals, but calling an entire industry cruel and equating them with felons because they kill chickens (or beeves or pigs) for food is extremist. This kind of rhetoric is engaged in not by kindly people who want to protect animals, but by zealots who want everybody to conform to their way of thinking. I suppose Pamela Anderson has the right to express her opinion and the dollars to do so on a billboard, but in my opinion her adopting terrorist rhetoric makes her just another nut.
If you haven’t guessed, I’m an omnivore. I avoid KFC myself, but only because I don’t like their cooking. They seem to be able to make chicken both dry and greasy at the same time. UGH!
Hey, be fair. If her IQ were bigger than her bra size, she’d have figured out the Grand Unification Theory by now.
And the fact remains that this attitude is patronizing and can be used to justify just about any damn thing you want it to.
So everybody’s up in arms about mistreatment of chickens by a few farm employees in one farm, but nobody says anything yet about the grinding penury most chicken farmers are forced into? That unlike beef farming, which I know has terribly price-fixing issues and such, most poultry farmers don’t even own the chickens? That chicken farming is probably the best way to drive yourself and your family into the ground in the agriculture business? That chicken farms tend to be in already improverished parts of the country to start with?
Of course I don’t want animals I eat to be treated cruelly, but I wish to hell there was a way I could easily choose to buy meat certified to have been produced with no human cruelty. Why can I buy free-range meat, but not, for example, meat certified to have been packed by union workers at a living wage or chicken certified owned by an actual farmer?
Yes, I know - I could buy a whole chicken off somebody’s farm, I could do more shopping at farmers’ markets, all that, and if I were “really serious” about the issues I would - but the fact is, I’m sure a lot of people would choose non-human-exploitation products if they were available, easily recognizable, and promoted.
So yeah, I agree but disagree, PETA is a pack of nutjobs, and I don’t really care to hear Pamela Anderson’s opinion on… well, anything.
Doesn’t this assume that KFC knew about the practices? Do you think that the behaviour shown in the video link went on when KFC execs were touring the facility?
It is entirely possibly that no customers of that shop knew what it was doing until the story broke. Not that any of them would care…
“If meat is murder, are eggs rape?”
-P.J. O’Rourke
NITPICK!
She’s a U.S. citizen now.
No, not a fact. Your opinion, nothing more.
And it was an explanation, not a justification.
Spooje! Keep up! I’m talking about the kind of practices that 70%+ of reared chickens are kept in! I’m talking about the kind of incredibly barbaric and inhumane practices that are the norm, not a one-off! You think that KFC don’t know how chickens are generally reared in farms across the US?
Of course, a corporation has a legal duty to make profit for its shareholders, so KFC can’t just decide to chance supplier on ethical grounds if they will lose profit by doing so. But if Pam raises sufficient outrage in the consumer that they boycott KFC, KFC’s profit interests will be aligned with ethical interests and they will insist that their suppliers rear chickens in better conditions. This is the entire point. It is foolish in the extreme to say that people should just leave KFC alone because they don’t do the rearing.
And desertgeezer, I don’t know where you get the idea that anything other than battery farming will make eating chicken an unobtainable dream. How much is your average battery farmed chicken anyway? About $5? So give it a touch more space and a nesting and shitting area and you’ll pay $6.25 instead. Hardly unaffordable. Hell, even fully free-range, it’s unlikely to cost more than about $10. It’s then up to your conscience what you consider acceptable.
pan
Memo to P.J. O’Rourke: you’re supposed to fry them, not fuck them, you imbecile.
Geezus. If you want evidence of battery farming just go to your supermarket. All the eggs in Australia (and I can’t see why it’d be different in the US) are labeled either “caged” or “free range.” I can’t understand why anyone would support battery farms.
Even if you don’t give a toss about the living conditions of chickens battery eggs have smaller, runnier, much paler yolks, don’t taste as good, and at the supermarket level aren’t that much more costly.
As if PETA would stop if KFC changed their ways. They may have done some good a while ago, but now the organization has changed into a group of attention seeking uber-whiners. Let us not forget that these smart little people think that house pets have stockholm syndrome.
And I thought KFC stood for Kitchen Fresh Chicken :dubious:
I’m not a PETA member or any other kind of animal activist but how would this work?
Farmer “Yep, my farm makes me a fine living. I stuff chickens into teeny little cages, hey they are chickens why would they need to move? I chop off there beaks because chickens that fight get all messed up and who needs that? Is it cruel? Hey they ain’t just chickens they are my bread and butter.”
Yep. I can see a perfectly unbiased cite coming from a farmer. Much like you will never find an unbiased opinion on the death penalty, smoking, abortion, religion or any other subject that people hold strong opinions on.
I’m a meat eater but I only buy free range eggs. When I can give up my bacon addiction I will become a non meat eater (got to give up smoking first though).
Minor nitpick: Pam’s protesting in an effort to hit KFC’s bottom line is an attempt to get KFC to conform to Pam’s ethics.
Since ethics of chicken farming are not entirely an objective thing, both Pam and consumers are free to do as they choose.
Aside from the 11 employees at a company of unspecified size that were caught being unnecessarily cruel, and were rightfully fired and investigated, it is not a given that ‘33% more space per cage’ is the goal of Pam’s campaign, either.
I don’t care enough to find out how much bigger the cages Pam wants. If the campaign was to outlaw battery farming altogether I could get behind it 100%.
That chickens in the third world are treated more humanely than chickens in the first world is disgusting.
And I see Pam’s (and PETA’s) crusade as ‘give them an inch, they will take a mile.’
Give in on this, and they’re going to push further and further and further until that wack-job Ingrid Newkirk bitch gets her way and we’re all sucking down tofu.
(Soy gives me hives.)