Another point is that KFC has vegetarian side dishes. I have vegetarian friends that eat french fries from fast food restaurants.
This is PETAs web site for this subject.
Its not enough to aim this at adults, there is a link for a “Kids Corner” Here is part of what they are saying to kids,
Go to the web site for all of it.
“A KFC bucket of chicken wings translates into a BIG body count. Think about it—every bird has only two wings (if only all math problems were this easy). Log onto KFC’s Web site and you’ll see that about 736 million chickens are killed when they are just 6 or 7 weeks old.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. PETA is not a terrorist organization. The Secret Life of Plants makes John Edwards look like Abe Lincoln. And PETA knows exactly what they’re doing: previous PR campaigns against Wendy’s and Burger King have resulted in pledges from those chains to improve conditions at their slaughterhouses. Go to PETA’s Web site, and you’ll find (somewhat bizarrely) an unpaid-for popup ad for Burger King.
PETA is, in their own weird way, pragmatic. They do these over-the-top PR campaigns as a way to pressure people into making incremental changes And they’re often effective.
I’m not a member of PETA, because I find them offensive and preachy and less than honest. But I recognize that they’re good tacticians, that they have a realistic goal of what they can accomplish. And they’re not, for fuck’s sake, terrorists.
“Benign” terrorists? The mind goggles.
Daniel
Or like California State Senator Don Perata, who voted to make concealed-carry weapon permits almost impossible for the average Californian to obtain, getting a concealed-carry weapon permit for himself.
Oh, wait – Perata actually did this.
When does PETA consider a chicken dead? I’ve killled chickens and they will run and flop for twenty minutes without their head.
Oh, and Troy, cute comment about DDT. However, if you actually looked at PETA’s Web site, you’d find that they’re calling for the use of argon gas. As far as I’m aware, there’s no research suggesting that argon collects in fatty tissues; your objection is a canard.
A more substantial objection might be that gassing chickens is more expensive, and that the decreased cruelty does not outweigh the increased cost. I think PETA’s campaign is designed to counter this objection.
Daniel
When does PETA consider a chicken dead? I’ve killled chickens and they will run and flop for twenty minutes without their head.
Or, in one case, for 18 months!
I suppose PETA appears a bit extreme, but I can admire them for taking their belief (that cruelty to animals is not ethical) and being consistent with it.
I share that belief, and run with when it’s easy (I don’t eat meat, and I try to buy eggs from free-range chickens, milk from cows who have a chance to walk around a bit), but I compromise. If I need dress shoes to meet my job’s dress code, and the only shoes I can afford have a bit of leather, I’ll still get them. I don’t eat Jell-O (consume gelatin for fun) but I’ll take vitamins with gelatin in them.
I find veal especially morally offensive (the concept of restraining an animal to a particularly cruel existence to make it tastier), but I don’t comment if I go out to dinner with people who order it. I prefer to not be rude—but maybe that’s a moral weakness on my part.
So, when PETA does something kind of weird, it doesn’t bother me because a part of me thinks maybe I should be doing the weird stuff too.
Sometimes they’re over-dramatic, but when it comes to slaughterhouse practices, I don’t think they are. It’s not unusual for the meat industry to tear animals apart when they aren’t dead yet.
So, while I won’t lean over your plate while you’re eating to lecture you about what happened to your food before it reached you, I will suggest (since you’re probably not eating right now, but reading what people think about PETA) that if you choose to eat meat, you might want to visit a slaughterhouse someday. You know, be educated about your choices, and all that, and freely choose.
It’s not just one cow . . . animals are butchered alive with alarming frequency. If this doesn’t bother you all that much, look at it from a standpoint of your own safety: a suffering animal writhes around as it’s being gutted. A knife then punctures the intestine, spilling shit all over the meat. They don’t just throw out tainted carcasses: they hose them off, chop them up, and ship them out. People then find themselves in the hospital due to an e-coli outbreak.
Rocks don’t feel pain. I don’t care if the creature is not sentient, I don’t want anything to feel more pain than is absolutely necessary. I don’t care less if it’s a “lower” life form. It feels agony, just as a human does. Pain is pain, no matter what creature is feeling it.
You poor, misguided soul. You actually think that’s beef? 
Mom says I can’t start an “Ask the former chicken farmer” thread, but I did used to own a chicken farm. As far as inhumanity, those big barns where we raised them were rather crowded, but too much crowding would mean stress, leading to lower weight () and greater mortality (also ). I had to kill up to a dozen a day myself (manually) because they were too small or twisted to be marketable. You grab their heads and snap them like a whip. Toured a local poultry plant once, seemed like death came pretty rapidly (blade to the neck).
There’ve been huge strides made in the humane slaughter of cows in our country. Temple Grandin (who has a website…www.grandin.com) designed several processing plants that allow for a gentler, kinder, happier slaughter.
FYI: for all those McDonalds haters out there, in the NYT article titled The Food Chain, Michael Pollard quotes Grandin “Grandin says that in cattle slaughter ‘there is the pre-McDonald’s era and the post-McDonald’s era – it’s night and day.’” After horror stories of cattle waking up during their processing, McDonalds customers put plenty of pressure on the restaurant to review its methods.
A lot of it is dollars and cents. Cows are not allowed to watch other cows being killed. A terrified cow can have a surge of adrenaline into its muscles that lowers the quality of its meat. Cows are killed quickly, because a cow that’s been allowed to bleed into its muscles, once again makes for a lower quality of meat.
Lissa, I’d have to disagree with you that animals are being butchered alive with alarming frequency. This, from the above-mentioned article: "For a plant to pass a McDonald’s audit, the stunner needs to render animals ‘‘insensible’’ on the first shot 95 percent of the time. A second shot is allowed, but should that one fail, the plant flunks. "
I’d fully agree with the fact that many animals are treated cruelly before they’re slaughtered, but I believe our killing methods are pretty humane. Cows do not generally pass away surrounded by their loved ones. In the wild (if there were such a thing as a herd of wild cows…but take a herd of deer, for instance), an older, weaker member from the herd would be chased down and eaten alive by a pack of carnivores.
Since when is gassing someone or something less cruel?
They also want the chickens to be selected by machinery rather than by hand.
I guess this is so that instead of being grabbed by some Jethro at the plant, it gets mangled by a piece of steel.
Great.
Lunatics.
Some large chicken producers controll stress-related weight loss with drugs, and hormones. Chickens are stacked to the ceiling in tiny cages, in which the bird cannot stand, and can barely move. Sometimes, their feet grow around the wire of th cage floor. So crowded are the chickens that if the power goes off, and the fans stop blowing, the chickens suffocate. They are covered in the feces of the birds above them, so are given large doses of anti-biotics to control disease. Egg layers are “de-beaked” so that they cannot break the eggs, and are starved to force molting. The smell is indescribable.
This only applies to the plants that are audited. A good potion of them are not suppliers to McDonald’s, and thus are not monitored. PETA-like orginizations are not welcome in most plants. Even the FDA doesn’t have as much monitoring power as it used to have.
The book * Fast Food Nation * by Eric Schlosser has a lenghty section on the meat-packaging industry, and its deplorable conditions.
In the wild, the cow would roam free in a clean environment, not in a feed lot, standing in a foot of feces. The cow could chose what to eat, not be fed engineered grain and hormones. She could raise her own young, rather than the calves being boxed in crates to prevent them from moving and toughening their mucsles. She could feed her calf, rather than suffer a swollem udder, again due to hormones, that sometimes cracks and bleeds. Yes, she may be downed by a pack of wolves, but the conditions of her life before would have been much different.
Just because the wolves are cruel, should we be as well? Considering that we have evolved the sense of empathy, how are we excused from causing unnecessary suffering? A wolf’s only weapons are his teeth, whereas we have the means to kill our food quickly and with minimal pain. The only thing that holds us back is our desire for speed and effeciency for profit’s sake.
Duh - they’re the Enlightened. The rules they create for us barbarians couldn’t possibly apply to them.
I believe Schlosser’s main point in that section was to illustrate the deplorable conditions in meat-packing plants for the workers, not the cattle. By Schlosser’s account the animals are killed humanely; it is the human workers who suffer most.
I don’t think that’s a moral weakness, keira. It’s called being civil. The difference between you and the zealots who do interrupt people’s meals with horror stories about veal is that you recognize that other people may have a different opinion, and respect their right to have it. Rudeness is the morally weak position in my opinion.
I have no problem with people who don’t eat meat or don’t wear fur, They have a perfect right to choose their own behavior. But when people tell friends, or even strangers at a dinner table that they are responsible for the agony of the poor animal they are eating, or stand in front of a night club on a cold night and throw red dye on women wearing fur coats, they are not educating anyone. They are terrorists, pure and simple. I wouldn’t use the word benign to describe what they do, whatever their motives are. Good motives are no excuse for uncivil behavior.
I think you need to reread the chapter, Audrey. By Schlosser’s account, the animals are killed humanely when the procedure is done correctly, which by Schlosser’s account happens a whole lot less often than any of us want to believe.
And Lissa, it’s highly honorable cause you’re speaking for. But, you’re going to find nothing but ridicule at the SDMB if you start talking about animal rights, factory farms, or any sort of environmental/green activism.
People here weep and cry and ofter nothing but sympathy when someone says that they saw a mean old man kick his dog yesterday. But, if you bring up slaughterhouses or animal rights, those same weeping, crying, and sympathetic people will do nothing but (very maturely, I might add) be sarcastic and call you names.
Best,
TGD
Perhaps we are talking about different chapters here. I’m referring to Chapter 8, entitled “The Most Dangerous Job”, which is about the hazards of the meatpacking plant. In it, there is no reference (that I could find) to inadvertently inhumane killing procedures. Could you point out where you’re referring to?