Frank and Frightening: ‘Don’t Buy Cheap Chicken’ TV Ad Against Food Lion Launches in Baltimore
The new PETA ad will air Monday and Tuesday during the 6 p.m. news broadcast on WMAR-TV (ABC).
For Immediate Release:
October 12, 2015
Contact:
Catie Cryar 202-483-7382
A new PETA ad targeting Food Lion’s discount chicken will hit the airwaves this week in Baltimore, a city with 22 Food Lion stores in a mere 20-mile radius. The ad, available here, shows chicken parts slithering out of meat trays and coming together to form a living chicken who struggles to breathe as a voiceover explains, “Food Lion lures customers into its stores with the promise of cheap chicken. For special offers, these chickens end up paying the price. Factory farmers force them to live in appalling conditions and in constant pain.”
The new PETA ad will air Monday and Tuesday during the 6 p.m. news broadcast on WMAR-TV (ABC).
“PETA’s ad may be hard to stomach, but it’s even more disturbing to learn that chickens raised for cheap meat are bred to grow so large that their leg bones crack and that many have their throats cut while they’re still conscious,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “We want shoppers to consider the true cost to the birds of every piece of Food Lion’s cheap chicken and to choose vegan foods instead.”
As documented by PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—chickens used for food are fed a steady diet of antibiotics and bred to grow so large that their legs often break under their own weight. At the slaughterhouse, they’re shackled upside down and their throats are slit, while others are scalded alive in defeathering tanks.
PETA was inspired to produce the ad after Dutch animal rights group Wakker Dier persuaded a major supermarket chain in the Netherlands to cut back dramatically on the number of specials on discounted meat. PETA worked with Wakker Dier and Dutch production company MacGyver Amsterdam to create the new ad, and Dutch actor Rutger Hauer provided the voiceover.
A broadcast-quality copy of the ad is available upon request. For more information, please visit PETA.org.
