For Immediate Release:
November 10, 2004

Contact:
Dan Shannon 757-622-7382  

Miami — PETA had hoped to place its brand-new anti-KFC billboard, which shows Pamela Anderson in a dress that shows off her fit, veggie-fueled body next to the tagline "Boycott KFC—Live Scalding, Painful Debeaking, Crippled Chickens" and steers motorists to KentuckyFriedCruelty.com, in Miami, but area outdoor advertisers wanted no part of it, despite the fact that the billboard has run in Tampa, Boston, Dallas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The national billboard blitz is the latest salvo in PETA’s international campaign to pressure KFC to crack down on cruel treatment of chickens by KFC suppliers, including a slaughterhouse in Moorefield, W.Va., where workers were caught kicking, throwing, and stomping live birds in a widely distributed video.

Anderson, who also recently wrote to NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr., asking that he use his position as KFC pitchman to pressure the company into curbing the worst abuses of its chickens, joins PETA in 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. Undercover investigations like the one in Moorefield have turned up exactly the same abuses that KFC denies having to address—including crippled chickens kept in crowded, filthy conditions and sadistically tortured. The widely read British newspaper The Sunday Mirror led a report on an investigation into a U.K. KFC supplier with the headline "Distressed and Dying in a Cramped Shed … Nobody Does Chicken Like KFC."

Seinfeld star and ex-KFC pitchman Jason Alexander had his contract with KFC canceled after PETA enlisted him to speak to company execs about the suffering of chickens. PETA has had additional high-profile support from Nobel Peace Prize winner His Holiness the Dalai Lama, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, actors Bea Arthur and Richard Pryor, rock legends Sir Paul McCartney and Chrissie Hynde, and civil-rights leaders Alice Walker, Kweisi Mfume, Dick Gregory, and Dr. Cornel West.

"KFC stands for cruelty," says Anderson, who is a vegan and promotes PETA’s boycott of KFC on her wildly popular Web site. "If KFC executives treated cats or dogs the way they treat chickens, they could go to prison on felony cruelty-to-animals charges."

For more information, please visit PETA’s Web site KentuckyFriedCruelty.com. A copy of the billboard follows.