For every chicken you don’t eat, I’m going to eat three.

This is from the calendar that hangs in my cubicle. The other designers got these “Food Services of America” calendars as freebies from one of our printing companies. One of them got tired of looking at last month’s not-so-appetizing-looking hot dog picture and hung it in my cube. I promptly changed the month to September, which had a much more mouth watering picture– enough to make me salivate whenever I walk into my cube, hehe.

So I was surfing the net gathering some nutrition information this morning (seeing what I can get away with eating with the diet and all, heh). KFC has the Twister with a Pepsi for $2.99 again, so I thought I’d check it out to see how many calories it has, since I’ve been hankering for some form of chicken lately. I notice on KFC’s front page a link to information about a “Pilgrim’s Pride” incident. I’ve heard of KFC being singled out by PETA before with animal rights shenanigans, so out of curiosity clicked the link. I was actually more surprised at KFC’s response to PETA than I was about the information on this Pilgrim’s Pride incident. It paints both PETA and the media as deceptive, misleading pieces of ish.

(click below for the KFC link and the rest of my rant, if you’re bored enough to read it, heh).

KFC on the Pilgrim’s Pride incident and PETA

Not long ago a coworker of mine told me he was vegetarian. He’s a cool guy, I don’t hold it against him. I guess his wife got him to read a book about how animals / livestock are treated badly and it turned him off of eating meat. This was a few years ago that he stopped eating meat, and he’s probably in his 40’s or 50’s now.

A quick google search of “Pilgrim’s Pride incident” reveals some information and I admit it is disturbing the way these employees were treating the animals prior to slaughter.There’s no reason to “grossly and gratuitously” abuse animals before they are slaughtered. It seems strange to think about caring how an animal is treated in a slaughterhouse since it’d doomed anyways, but I guess it boils down to minimizing the animal’s suffering in the process of being slaughtered. Such appalling treatment of animals is disgusting. It’s a base facet of human nature but it’s not unique to slaughterhouses.

However, more disturbing to me are PETA’s actions, which do not make me sympathetic to their cause. If anything it makes me dislike and distrust them more. Hell, I wouldn’t even be surprised if PETA was behind that incident, just so they’d have something to try to advance their cause with.

Ultimately I get the impression that their cause is vegetarianism. Hello! Last time I checked there was a natural food chain. We happen to sit atop of the food chain. Meat is a part of that food chain. There are other species out there that live off meat. Are they required to treat their food humanely before they kill it? Have you ever watched the discovery channel and seen animals feeding on other animals? It’s not a pretty sight, but it’s not unnatural. I’m not saying we shouldn’t treat animals humanely, I’m just saying… that eating meat is natural and not something that should be crusaded against and shunned. We shouldn’t torture and kill animals for fun or for sport, but using them as needed for food is a different matter.

I don’t doubt that Americans eat too much meat. There was a stark contrast to the type and amount of meat I ate while I lived in Korea to the amount that I sometimes eat (at Rodizio’s Grill and Tony Romas, for example) and that I see others eat here in America. I think most of the time I actually prefer how they do it in Korea—they take a little meat and give it lots of flavor so that a little bit goes a long way with rice and such.

In retrospect, PETA probably hates the Atkins hype that’s going on right now, hehe.

What’s the point of this rant? I don’t know. But I likes me some chicken and PETA can go to hell with their unethical tactics (ironic since they’re supposedly the “People for Ethical Treatment of Animals”). If someone doesn’t want to eat meat that’s fine, but I reserve the right to choose to eat meat.

I stole the title of this post from another web site which won’t load for me right now (actually says “animal” rather than “chicken”)—it’s a joke, of course, to sponsor a vegetarian by eating 3 animals for everyone 1 that they don’t eat, thereby ensuring that more animals are eaten due to their vegetarianism than if they just ate meat like everyone else. Am I really going to eat three animals for every one a single vegetarian doesn’t? Of course not, that’s more than I can afford both monetarily and in my diet’s calorie budget, heh. But I’m still eating meat and eggs and the like. Protein has to come from somewhere and I’m sure not getting it all from peanuts. Meat is part of a balanced diet along with vegetables, fruits, grains, etc., so should I stop eating it because a handful of people got fired for abusing chickens? No sir. I belong to another organization, also called PETA: People Eating Tasty Animals, heh.

Speaking of which, I still need to find out how many calories are in those Twisters.