Oprah, What Are You Thinking With Free KFC?
May 10th, 2009
Ever since American talk show host Oprah Winfrey announced that her website www.oprah.com would be giving away coupons for free chicken dinners, KFC restaurants around America have been literally inundated with people coming with coupons in hand for a free chicken dinner, including two side dishes and a farm biscuit.
The situation has gotten so bad that many stores either ran out of chicken or had to turn people away without honoring the coupon.
Why America’s most popular female talk show host would offer such a deal is beyond the comprehension of most sane people, including those who are against the killing of millions of innocent fowl to satisfy the hunger of these people. The following piece, taken from a website, called www.Kentuckyfriedcruelty.com sums it up well: KFC suppliers cram birds into huge waste-filled factories, breed and drug them to grow so large that they can’t even walk, and often break their wings and legs.
At slaughter, the birds’ throats are slit and they are dropped into tanks of scalding-hot water — often while they are still conscious. It would be illegal for KFC to abuse dogs, cats, pigs, or cows in these ways.
In addition, it’s now becoming evident that many of these factory farms feed their chickens arsenic, mixed in with chicken feed, as both a growth stimulant as well as to kill parasites.
Fast food chicken establishments are now open in many parts of the Middle East, including: Bahrain. Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the UAE. The arsenic issue is not limited solely the USA, as it has been revealed that small quantities of arsenic were fed as a growth stimulant to chickens in Israel from 2003 to 2006.
Although officially discontinued in 2006, the damage done by three years of eating chickens laced with arsenic has most likely left arsenic residues in many people, which one day could cause cancers and other health problems.
Israel has a very large and well developed poultry industry, with more than 700 poultry farms producing more then 400,000 tons of chicken meat a year.
Chicken is one of the country’s main sources of animal protein; and Israelis are the second largest world chicken consumers, averaging 36 kg per person per year. Much Israeli poultry is also raised on large farms, which also supplies eggs to large supermarket chains.
Due to Jewish Kashrut dietary laws, chickens have to be ritually slaughtered, which many say is much more humane than the American example noted above. That still doesn’t eliminate the problem of feeding hormones and other growth supplements to chickens that between 2003 and 2006 included arsenic as well.
Arsenic was also fed to pigs being raised in Israel, also as a growth stimulant. Free-range chicken, under the Teva Off brand are now available in Israel it’s doubtful but KFC franchises will use them, due to their smaller size and higher costs.
One reader of her site wrote: “I found it interesting that Oprah would promote KFC after doing a show about the horrors of factory farming.”
This post was first written by freelance journalist and blogger Maurice Picow at the world’s only Middle East focused environment news site and blog Green Prophet - www.greenprophet.com.
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Have you ever visited a poultry slaughter house or poultry farm in North Africa or The Middle East? If you had then you would know that the situation is the same as in most other countries, perhaps worse. It is also common practice in live bird poultry shops in Egypt to drop the birds into boiling water to help in the removal of the feathers. For a “MID-EAST” youth your comments seem to exclude the mid-east — why is that?
Wayne, I believe the article did mention what’s being done in Israel. But at least there, the birds are killed according to Jewish ritual methods, which do not allow scalding the feathers off while they are still alive.
What happens in Egypt and other countries is anybody’s guess.
I don’t think anything with Free KFC, I just hate junk food enough not to eat for the whole day!
I was alone for several years, and sometimes I have to be alone for months eating this junk, there is nothing like the home made food guys, even if you get it for free, believe me!
Here in India too the way they kill the birds is almost the same.Where the customer happens to be a Muslim the vendor offers a short prayer and a drop or two of water to the bird.Mostly the head of the bird is summarily cut off and the carcas dropped into a barrel allowing it to die there.Then only the skin is pealed off which many call “dressing”.This is what I saw when I had to go with a non veg friend to buy chicken for him.But then is there anything that we could really do to lessen the pain caused?Is it possible to convert everyone into a vegetarian?