PETA Educates Dublin Schoolchildren With Kfc ‘Bloody Buckets’

Messages and Images Show Kids That KFC Takes Chickens From Shell to Hell

For Immediate Release:
6 May 2005

Contact:
Yvonne Taylor +44 (0)20 7357 9229, ext. 405
Sean Gifford +44 (0)20 7357 9229, ext. 226

Dublin – Holding signs that read, “The Colonel’s Secret Recipe: Live Scalding, Painful Debeaking, Crippled Chickens”, PETA members will hand out “Bloody Buckets” – containers mimicking KFC’s iconic buckets, filled with “bones”, “feathers”, an evil “Col Sanders” figure, a plastic chicken with her throat slit and lots of fake blood – to kids outside a Dublin school:

Date: Wednesday, 18 May
Time: 3:15 p.m.
Place: Ardscoil La Salle Secondary School, Raheny Road, Dublin 5

The “Bloody Buckets” are the latest salvo in PETA’s international campaign against KFC suppliers’ farming and slaughter abuses. PETA attempted to work with executives of KFC’s parent company, Yum! Brands, prior to launching its “Kentucky Fried Cruelty” Campaign, but despite assurances made long ago by Senior Vice President Jonathan Blum that KFC would “raise the bar” on animal welfare, the company refuses to eliminate the worst abuses by its suppliers. High-profile support for PETA’s campaign has come from Justin Hawkins of The Darkness, Pamela Anderson, the Black Eyed Peas, the Beastie Boys, Sir Paul McCartney and Chrissie Hynde, among others. More than 8,000 protests against KFC have taken place around the world so far.

PETA is calling on KFC to make basic improvements based on the best available scientific research and the recommendations of members of KFC’s own animal welfare advisory panel. A PETA undercover investigator in the US caught workers at a KFC supplier kicking, throwing and stomping on live birds. Undercover investigations into KFC suppliers in Germany, India, the UK and Australia have turned up the same abuses: crippled chickens kept in crowded, filthy conditions. The Sunday Mirror led a report on an investigation into a KFC supplier in the UK with the headline “Distressed and Dying in a Cramped Shed … Nobody Does Chicken Like KFC”.

“Kids would lose their lunches if they knew what happened to chickens raised and killed for KFC”, says PETA Director of European Campaigns Sean Gifford. “If KFC executives treated cats or dogs the way they treat chickens, they could go to prison for cruelty to animals.”

For more information, please visit PETA’s Web site KFCCruelty.co.uk. High-resolution images of the “Bloody Bucket” are available on request.

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