Animal Rights Update

So far I have have posted our images on 4chan and canv.as in addition to tumblr. On tumblr, my “It’s finger lickin’ good image” gained some popularity and received 71 so far. I got some interesting responses on 4chan as well. I posted images on the animals thread, food thread, and also the random thread /b/. You can read what people said in the screen caps I took. Reactions ranged from people hating on animal right activism and PETA, to people generally discussing KFC and fast food. On canv.as I also a good/interesting response to our images with 41 replies. You can look at and read the thread here. Although I did have some people who were supporting the cause and liked the memes, most people seemed to be hating on animal rights activists and were discrediting the issue. Overall I think we got some interesting responses and got people talking, which was part of the goal of our campaign.

Animal Rights Update

Here are three memes that I have created that address the issue of animal cruelty and KFC. The next step is to post these images on message boards and blogs and see what reactions these images elicit in people.

Fast Food Chains and Animal Cruelty

For my project I want to focus on the issue of animal cruelty, specifically focusing on the way that fast food restaurant chains treat their animals before they are slaughtered.  KFC, for example, is one of the largest restaurant chains specializing in fried chicken in the US and Canada, and there has been a number controversies that have come to light in regards to how they treat their animals. Here are some facts for the Kentucky Fried Cruelty‘s website:

• The roughly 1 billion chickens killed each year for KFC’s buckets are crammed by the tens of thousands into excrement-filled sheds that stink of ammonia fumes.
• The birds’ legs and wings often break because they’re bred to be too top-heavy and because workers carelessly shove them into transport crates and shackles.
• Chickens’ throats are slit and the animals are dropped into tanks of scalding-hot water to remove their feathers, often while they are still conscious and able to feel pain.

These claims are backed up with undercover investigations that have been done of KFC chicken suppliers. In 2004, for example, a “PETA undercover investigation caught workers on video stomping on chickens, kicking them, and violently slamming them against floors and walls. Workers also ripped the animals’ beaks off, twisted their heads off, spat tobacco into their eyes and mouths, spray-painted their faces, and squeezed their bodies so hard that the birds expelled feces—all while the chickens were still alive” (Kentucky Friend Cruelty Website). KFC and other fast food chains have promised to take animal welfare seriously, but investigation like the one just mentioned show that they fail to live up to what they say. There are alternatives to the way that chickens and other animals are currently slaughtered, such as by using controlled-atmosphere killing, which is a process in which oxygen is removed from the birds’ atmosphere and replaced with a non-poisonous gas that puts the animals to sleep while they are still in their transport crates. My proposal is to create a series of memes that play off of the fast food restaurant’s advertising campaigns. Adbusters is a group that has done some things like this in the past. I am thinking that I will juxtapose an image of animal cruelty that has come out of the undercover investigations with a well known advertising slogan used by the restaurant. Here is an example that I have created:

This is an image of a bird that has been dragged through boiling hot water while still alive and was scalded to death. The industry calls them ‘red birds.’
Here are some other links that discuss this issue:

McDonalds Animal Cruelty

Article on Cruelty and the McRib