On Friday, three activists with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) held a protest at the Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) restaurant located at 945 Michigan NE in Grand Rapids. The PETA members, all of whom were women, wore nothing other than two banners that read "KFC Tortures Chicks" on the front and "Turn Your Back on KFC Cruelty" on the back. The protestors, who have staged similar events around the country as part of a coordinated effort by PETA members to hold either nude or bikini-clad protests, designed to increase awareness about Kentucky Fried Chicken's treatment of chickens and PETA's ongoing campaign to challenge the restaurant. The women were joined by two additional protests during the twenty minutes that Media Mouse observed the protest.
PETA's Kentucky Fried Cruelty campaign was launched after two years of PETA attempting to work with KFC to improve the conditions under which the 850 million chickens slaughtered by the restaurant each year are raised. While other competitors such as Burger King and McDonald's have made progress on animal welfare issues following PETA campaigns, KFC has refused to make substantive improvements and has attempted to mislead the public about its treatment of animals. Undercover investigations by PETA have shown horrible abuses of chickens at KFC suppliers in West Virginia, Maryland, Arkansas, and Alabama, as well at plants outside of the United States in the United Kingdom, Canada, and other countries. At a West Virginia plant that won a KFC "Supplier of the Year" award, workers were caught tearing chickens' heads off, ripping them apart, spitting tobacco on them, spray painting their faces, and throwing them against walls. This kind of treatment has been repeatedly shown to be taking place at plants supplying KFC with chicken, yet the company has refused to do anything.
In order to improve conditions for chickens slaughtered by KFC, PETA has supported a "recommended animal welfare program" that was actually created by members of KFC's own animal welfare board. The plan makes a series of broad recommendations that KFC could take to improve the treatment of chickens--all of which are consistent with industry practices--but KFC has refused to adopt the recommendations. The recommendations call for KFC to adopt the "Animal Care Standards" program that would establish guidelines to protect chickens on factory farms by covering issues such as ammonia concentration, lighting conditions, and living space in chicken sheds. It prohibits intentional starvation of breeding birds, and also requires that birds be provided with mental stimulation. The recommendations call for measures to attempt to make the slaughter process more "humane," although no system that is based on the murder of 850 million chickens per year could ever be described as such. Nevertheless, it has been suggested that KFC replace electrical stunning and throat-slitting methods of killing birds--often done when they are conscious--with "controlled-atmosphere killing." Improvements are also being sought for chickens' lives before they are killed, with recommendations to switch to "less cruel" mechanized chicken gathering instead of manual chicken gathering from pens (resulting in less broken legs, bruising, and stress on chickens), breeding for health instead of rapid growth by ending the practice of using antibiotics for non-therapeutic purposes. Perhaps the most important recommendation is for increased transparency and verifiability, with the recommendations calling for independent and unannounced third-party audits and disclosure of the results on KFC's website.
PETA cites numbers showing that 95% of people want to see humane treatment of animals used for food, and the goals of this campaign represent are admirable both in their substance and that they are modest enough that both meat eaters and vegetarians and vegan can support them, with the goals representing the very minimum of what people should be doing to improve the deplorable treatment of animals raised for food by humans. However, these goals are often lost through tactics such as those used today by the naked PETA protestors in Grand Rapids. While these tactics occasionally get PETA press attention (although not always, as the Grand Rapids Press wrote about why they refused to cover a similar protest over a year ago), there are significant questions about how they reinforce patriarchal values. At the protest today, men driving by in cars honked at the women--not necessarily in support--but instead as they gawked at the sight of women standing naked on a street corner. PETA's tactics downplay the relationship that exists between eating meat and the oppression of women, a relationship most famously raised by the feminist Carol Adams in her book the Sexual Politics of Meat. Adams has also written specifically on the subject of PETA and their use of pornographic imagery, arguing that PETA's tactics inevitably add to the oppression of women under patriarchy and that she would not "liberate animals over the bodies of women." PETA's nudity reinforces the idea that women are acceptable objects for the male gaze and its alliances with institutions built on the oppression of women, such as Playboy, come at the expense of what could be a unified movement for animal and human liberation. Over the past several years, PETA has produced a number of advertisements that project objectifying and misogynistic portrayals of women, used questionable protests that use S&M and bestiality references, and even produced a web-only strip-tease video.
Moreover, however problematic and criticized PETA has been for its "I'd rather go naked than wear fur" campaign, nudity in that campaign was at least directly connected to the core of the campaign, the same cannot be said about the Kentucky Fried Cruelty campaign. The press release sent out about PETA's Grand Rapids protest prioritized the "PETA Beauties" who would be in Grand Rapids to "bare all" by "wearing nothing but a banner" over the treatment of chickens. The release makes no mention of the endorsements that the campaign has gotten or the undercover investigations into the company's treatment of chickens, instead hyping the nudity rather than KFC's treatment of chickens.
