My buddy Pulin, who works on the college campaign for those fast-living trend-junkies over at peta2, was in Panama City last week to try and throw a little bit of social responsibility into the potent mixture of drinking, partying, and boys and girls gone wild that is College Spring Break. You know: Sex, drugs, rock and roll, compassion for animals—all that good stuff. Anyway, a funny thing happened once Pulin and his gang brought out the chicken costume and began passing out leaflets about KFC. A probably well-intentioned but slightly over-eager dude in the crowd (pictured below) decided it would be a good idea to blindside the chicken (actually a University of Florida student named Beth) and tackle her to the ground. Beth was unhurt, but the police officers who witnessed the assault were relatively peeved about the whole thing:

The story has a happy ending though. Pulin and Beth decided that they wouldn't press charges if the tackler, who turned out to be a fairly affable fellow named Dave, would agree to get in the chicken costume himself and spend some time holding a sign to encourage people to stop eating animals. Dave was more than happy to oblige. The story made the front page of the Panama City News Herald, and you can check it out here.

If you caught the new episode of CSI on Thursday, you'll know that the story involved a murder at a "poultry manufacturing plant." Meaning, like, a murder of a human. But there was also plenty of footage used in the show from PETA undercover investigations of chicken slaughterhouses. We're already big CSI fans because of our friend Jorja Fox, but hooray for the number-one show in the world taking some time to let people know exactly what goes on behind the scenes in factory farms.

If you didn't catch that episode, you're probably going to have to wait until this season comes out on DVD. Sorry about that—next time I'll mention this sort of thing before the episode airs.

In the course of negotiations with a company like KFC—which refuses to make even minimal improvements in the lives of the billions of chickens it uses for profit—there is a time for subtlety and there’s a time for burning their corporate logo in effigy. This past week turned out to be of the latter sort. Check out the pic below from our awesome protest in Washington:

In related Colonel Sanders effigy news, I just discovered that PETA isn’t the only organization that has a longstanding KFC boycott. According to those omniscient folks over at Wikipedia, a Japanese baseball team called the Hanshin Tigers has failed to win a championship in more than 18 years due to what fans call “The Curse of the Colonel.” Apparently their run of bad luck started when a crowd of Tigers fans threw a Colonel Sanders statue into the river as part of a celebration.

So in case you’ve been looking for some more reasons to join PETA’s KFC boycott—in addition to the fact that KFC kills millions of chickens a year by boiling them to death—you can do it so that the much-maligned Hanshin Tigers can finally win the championship that has been stolen from them by a company that has nothing but contempt for animals, consumers, and Japanese baseball.