KFC Corporation (Kentucky Fried Chicken)
An animal rights group involved in a long legal dispute with Kentucky
Fried Chicken about the treatment of the 700 million chickens it buys
each year is to release a videotape today showing slaughterhouse workers
for one supplier jumping up and down on live chickens,drop-kicking them
like footballs and slamming them into walls,apparently for fun.
After officials of the KFC Corporation saw the videotape yesterday,they
said they would seek dismissal of the workers, inspect the
slaughterhouse more often and end their relationship if the cruelty was
repeated. The company that owns the slaughterhouse, the Pilgrim's Pride
Corporation, the country's second-largest poultry processor, said it was
"appalled" by the tape.
Animal rights groups have long complained that sheer malicious behavior-
on top of the expected confinement and bloodletting - goes on in
slaughter plants, but this is the first time such graphic proof has-been
produced. The tape was taken surreptitiously by an investigator for
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals who worked from October 2003
to May 2004 at a Pilgrim's Pride plant in Moorefield, W.Va., that won
KFC's "Supplier of the Year" award in 1997.
KFC and its parent, Yum Brands, have repeatedly committed themselves to
a promise that all suppliers would treat animals humanely. Yesterday, a
spokeswoman for KFC said the company "wouldn't tolerate the type of
behavior in the video."
KFC "will require that the employee or employees responsible be
terminated," said Bonnie Warschauer, director of public relations, and
further violations will "result in termination of our relationship."
Prominent veterinarians, including those on the company's animal welfare
advisory board, called for shutting the plant and dismissing or
prosecuting its managers. Dr. Ian J. H. Duncan, an animal and poultry
science professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, who is a KFC
adviser, said the tape "contains some of the worst scenes of animal
cruelty that I have ever witnessed."
A Pilgrim's Pride spokesman said the company had an anonymous report
about poultry mistreatment at the plant in April and had made it clear
to its workers that "any such behavior would result in immediate
termination." In light of the tape, the company said, it will reopen its
investigation.
The tape includes loud music the workers listen to, the screeching of
the birds and the sound of each hitting the wall. When released, it will
be on a Web site of the animal-rights group, which is known as PETA, at
kentuckyfriedcruelty.com.
The undercover investigator, who spoke on condition of anonymity because
he feared retaliation and still does undercover work for the group, said
in a telephone interview that he saw "hundreds" of acts of cruelty,
including workers tearing beaks off, ripping a bird's head off to write
graffiti in blood, spitting tobacco juice into birds' mouths,plucking
feathers to "make it snow," suffocating a chicken by tying a latex glove
over its head, and squeezing birds like water balloons to spray fecesover other
birds.
He said the behavior was "to alleviate boredom or vent frustrations,"
especially when so many birds were coming in that they would have to
work late.
On April 6, one day he filmed, workers made a game of throwing chickens
against a wall; 114 were thrown in seven minutes. A supervisor walking
past the pile of birds on the floor said, "Hold your fire," and, once
out of the way, told the crew to "carry on."
On another day, he said, the supervisor told the crew to kill correctly
because inspectors were visiting. To document cruelty and position his
tiny camera, he said, he spent eight months working in the "hang pen,"
where workers attach newly arrived chickens by their feet to a conveyor
that carries them upside-down through an electrified "stun bath" and
then into the whirling blades of the throat-cutting machine.
KFC says all its suppliers train their workers in animal welfare, but
the investigator said Pilgrim's Pride had nothing on the topic in its
orientation manual and the only instruction he received was after five
months, and then only in how to wring a chicken's neck by hand. The
Website of Pilgrim's Pride does not note any animal welfare policy.
Last year, PETA sued Kentucky Fried Chicken and called for a
boycott,demanding that it require its suppliers to give chickens more
room in factory barns, stop forcing growth so rapid that it cripples
birds, and to gas birds before hanging them so they feel no pain.
The group has won similar concessions from Burger King, McDonald's and
Wendy's. Yum Brands did not do as PETA requested, but its KFC Web site
says the company is "committed to the humane treatment of animals." It
describes steps taken to assure such treatment, including creating an
advisory council and promising to "only deal with suppliers who provide
an environment that is free from cruelty, abuse and neglect."
Dr. Temple Grandin, a well-known veterinary scientist who designs plants
for humane slaughter, called the behavior shown on the
videotape"absolutely atrocious."
Dr. Grandin is on KFC's animal welfare advisory board, but said PETA had
not told her when it sent her the tape this month where it had been
taken. "They need to fire the plant manager," she said.
Both Ms. Warschauer of KFC and a spokesman for Pilgrim's Pride said they
would ask Dr. Grandin to visit the plant. PETA said it planned to ask a
West Virginia prosecutor to prosecute plant employees and managers under
state laws that make torture or malicious killing of animals a felony.
It has also written to KFC and Pilgrim's Pride, asking them to use gas
to knock the animals out before they are killed and to mount video
cameras to forestall employee cruelty.
The PETA investigator said he would testify, calling it "the right thing
to do." Several American and British veterinary experts to whom PETA
sent the videotape expressed disgust. "I have visited many poultry
slaughterhouses but I have never seen cruelty to chickens to the extent
shown in this video," said Dr. Donald M. Broom, professor of animal
welfare at Cambridge University and chairman of the European Union's
animal welfare scientific committee."It would be grounds for a
successful prosecution for cruelty to animals in most countries."
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr