Animal Ally Rips Up Winning Gift Card, Protesters Occupy Raising Cane’s Grand Opening in Linden With Plea to Spare Birds

For Immediate Release:
August 17, 2026

Contact:
Alex Payne 202-483-7382

This morning at the grand opening of the new Raising Cane’s on W Edgar Road, PETA supporters entered the restaurant and shook up the opening moments by urging customers to save chickens’ lives by going vegan. Displaying heartbreaking undercover footage of birds in a slaughterhouse being strung up and having their throats slit, the animal advocates compelled diners to meet their meat before they were removed by security. Photos and video footage of the disruption are available here.

Animal ally and Mahwah, NJ, resident Vijosa Hoxha won a “Free Canes for a Year” gift card—which she promptly ripped up in protest of the chain’s bird abuse. Video is here.

“Behind every ‘chicken finger’ was a gentle bird who was crammed into a filthy shed with tens of thousands of others, engineered to grow so heavy that their bones can crack, and was terrified as their throat was cut,” says PETA President Tracy Reiman. “PETA is urging everyone to leave chickens in peace, not in pieces, and to please go vegan.”

Chickens are social learners who learn by watching one another; they form strong bonds, dream when they sleep, and worry about the future, just as humans do—but for fast food chicken shops, they are bred to grow such unnaturally large upper bodies for extra breast meat that their legs often become crippled under their unnatural weight. At slaughterhouses, mechanized blades slit their throats—often while they’re still conscious—and many are scalded to death in de-feathering tanks.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—points out that when it comes to the ability to feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a chicken is a dog is a boy. PETA offers a free vegan starter kit for anyone thinking of making the switch. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.