For Immediate Release:
February 11, 2005

Contact:
Sangeeta Kumar 757-622-7382

Toronto — Wearing nothing but a skimpy toga, wings, and a halo and holding a bow and arrow and a sign reading, "Have a Heart—Boycott KFC," PETA’s sexy Cupid will lead a protest outside a Toronto KFC on Valentine’s Day. The protest is part of an international campaign to pressure KFC to crack down on cruel treatment of chickens by KFC suppliers, including a slaughterhouse in West Virginia, in the U.S., where workers were caught kicking, throwing, and stomping on live birds in a widely distributed video:

Date: Monday, February 14
Time: 12 noon sharp
Place: KFC, 636 Bloor St. W.

PETA attempted to work with Yum! Brands executives 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. 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 hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, comedian Richard Pryor, rock icons Sir Paul McCartney and Chrissie Hynde, actors Pamela Anderson and Bea Arthur, and civil-rights leaders Alice Walker, Kweisi Mfume, Dick Gregory, and Dr. Cornel West.

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 at a KFC supplier in Moorefield, W.Va., caught workers on tape kicking, throwing, and stomping on live birds. Other investigations around the world have turned up exactly the same abuses that KFC denies having to address—including crippled chickens kept in crowded, filthy conditions and sadistically tortured.

KFC lags far behind one of its chief competitors, McDonald’s, which is actively exploring a more humane chicken-slaughter technology—controlled-atmosphere killing (CAK)—that PETA is calling on KFC to implement. With CAK, the oxygen that the birds are breathing is slowly replaced with nitrogen—which already makes up nearly 80 percent of the air that we breathe—masking the lack of oxygen and inducing sleep quickly and painlessly.

"KFC stands for cruelty in our book," says PETA Director of Vegan Campaigns Bruce Friedrich. "If Yum! 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.