Anybody who is against chicken torture hasn't spent a significant amount of time around them. They are stinking, filthy, stupid eating machines whose sole saving grace is their delicious flesh. If it weren't for their qualities when fried I'd demand that they be eradicated from the face of the earth. In fact, I'd recommend that slaughterhouses be more brutal. I'd advocate mass cockfights instead. Thunderdomes of poultry killing, ten thousand chickens enter, no chicken leaves.

God, I hate PETA.

For a split second there, I thought the chicken-eater was wearing an official Ace of Spades HQ t-shirt. How awesome would that have been?

Fried chicken is among the most wonderful substances ever invented.
And looking at one of those protester chicks, I think right after the picketing was through, she prolly drove around the block, came back, and bought a bucket.

LMAO

That was fucking hilarious. They sure got REAEEAAL quiet when he came up to thaem and started munching. Took em at least 30 second to figure out what to do when confronted with somebody who actually owns a pair.

Man, that was really funny.

Well, Alex_fs, chickens don't occur naturally anywhere that I know of so, except slaughter houses and farms, i think they are pretty much eradicated.

Plus, the word "chicken" is just inherently funny.

Go ahead, use it in a sentence. It's like "pants". As in "I find your lack of chickens disturbing".

SayUncle,

When the bioengineers finally produce an alternative source of tasty fried meat, the chickens' wild cousin, the jungle fowl, will have to go as well.
I'd link to a picture of them, but the comment system apparently refuses to link to pictures of naked animals.

While I think that such protests are silly, I have a hard time imagining how somebody could actually advocate torturing a chicken. We had chickens (which we raised for their eggs) when I was a kid. Yeah, they're very stupid and dirty animals. But to torture them?

I realize that it's just a joke. But if you've actually seen what happens on a factory farm, well...

I think that carrying signs outside of KFC is silly and counter-productive. At the same time, for our human dignity if nothing else, is it too much to ask that farming be remotely humane? Why is that such a ridiculous idea?

SJKevin -

Because, as Ace noted some time ago:

"Wouldn't you guess that, in the heirarchy of food-animals, chickens would be the first to be abused? I don't know why I think that.
Oh yeah, yes I do: because they're fucking chickens."

Megan:
Sure. But I'm not Andrew Sullivan, nor am I surprised that chickens are the first to be abused. I guess saying "they're fucking chickens" excuses anything? I don't follow the logic. I find it gobsmackingly vile.

Seriously, weird protesters aside, I just think we should treat animals humanely, and what really does happen in factory farms really is sick and wrong, even if they're just chickens. I don't understand how it's defensible.

SJKevin

it's ridiculous b/c the PETA asshats make it so.

They're not advocating better treatment of chickens, they're advocating doing away with the eating of all meat.

That makes their message suspect, regardless of its underlying reasonableness.

Dude.

They're fucking chickens.

I don't know how much simpler this can get.

Chickens have the brain capacity of a worm. We don't treat higher animals the same way. Yes, they are kept in tiny wire cages. But they are slaughtered with an electric knife that decaptitates them. What would you have us do?

Penguins are practically chickens.

Kev,

One would also assume that the traditional methods of slaughter (quick snap of the neck by twisting the hands) and then lopping the head off (as my dearly departed grandma would say, "chasing a chicken around the yard with blood flying out of its neck") are "humane," as they harken back to the pre-industrial age of meat processing.

Seems like exactly what the PETA assholes were complaining about.

I mean, they're not saying farmer Bob was as mean and creul as the "factory farms" (gosh, what a scary name)

Look, since when do we care what food thinks?

Ray, take that shit back.

Did you see the video of the Japanese penguin with a backpack that goes down to the fish market and back by himself (and gets a fish there too which goes in the pack, to be taken out by the owners)?

Penguins are the shit.

Thay are the most magestic of the flightless birds.

Chickens are their sub-retard Rosie-esque cousins twice removed.

My penguin is stupendous

Alex_fs - Great opener!

Well, all I got to add to Alex is animals in the wild are generally smarter than their domesticated counterparts. And cleaner.

We prefer dirty, docile, & stupid, so we breed 'em so!!

No welfare Mammy jokes, please.

see, this is cruelty to a chicken:

http://www.pervscan.com/2004/09/23/man-accused-of-sex-with-chicken/

Hob: Okay, withdrawn. I screwed it up anyway.

Penguins is practically chickens.

That I stand by.

I second Alex (#1) in sentiment and in his account of the facts about chickens. I'd stop eating fish or vegetables before I stopped eating chickens.

....(what the hell happened to me? Italics used to be so easy).

Damned penguin-hater ...

Don't hate, Ray. Love.

At last, a thread that actually touches on my weirdo area of expertise. I worked for 13 years at a zoological institution as a birdkeeper, where I raised dozens of species of birds, including 5 species of penguins. Here's my 2cents:

a. I love penguins, and I like chickens, too. Chickens have more personality than you would think.

b. Chickens are delicious. So are quail, pheasants, and waterfowl.

c. Parrots may be smart, but they are evil. With animals, intelligence isn't always a good thing.

d. All meat animals should be raised and slaughtered humanely, and those little cages don't cut it.

e. The folks who belong to PETA are the biggest twits in America.

I worked for 13 years at a zoological institution as a birdkeeper

Ok Stace, then settle it once and for all. Is penguins practically chickens? Yes or no.

I'm not up for making their death any more terrifying than it already is, but chickens, being barely more than houseplants, would not be where I'd start. Pigs is where I'd start. They know.

BTW, if you think we're mean to the chickens, you ought to see what a freaking opossum'll do to one if he can get their little heads in his disgusting mouth. Does anybody like an opossum? Even PETA?

I read something one time that said pigs are smarter than dogs. From my time around them, they are pretty intelligent creatures.

Possum is good for stew, but too gamey to eat any other way.

Yes Ray, penguins is practically chickens, except they don't taste good. And they swim a whole bunch better, and their poop smells like rotten fish. And they're monogamous.

Just how far out in weird land are these PETA idiots they must be living in a imaginary world of their own stupididy they must have watched dumb movies like CHICKEN RUN ,BABE or RACING STRIPES once too often and the real bird brains are themselves

Yeah possums are bad, and raccoons will stick their nasty little man-hands into a cage housing a $1000 bird and just start ripping parts off—wings, legs, whatever they can reach. Now that's cruel.

Yes Ray, penguins is practically chickens

There Hob. Eat me. I hope this is the last time I have to get into this with you over your god damned precious penguins. Now, once and for all.

PENGUINS IS PRACTICALL;Y CHICKENS.

All this talk about chicken-torture confuses me.

By what standard do we call it torture?

For example; is depriving chickens of sleep considered torture? What about long, repetitive interrogations? Are they OK, but only if the interrogator stays awake as long as the chicken? What about waterboarding?
Taking pictures of them naked, in a leash and collar?

It's a tough call.

As proof of their intelligence, penguins are perhaps the only creatures besides humans to develop prostitution (link here, if you don't believe me).

Chickens, by contrast, can't even exchange sex for dinner and a show. And their flirting skills are nonexistent.

Hmm. Doesn't seem to like my link. Okay, copy this:

http://www.sentex.net/~tntcomm/kwfn/Penguin.htm

The truth about penguin prostitution is out there.

Alex_fs

Funniest comment of all time

I am so tired of all the penguin worship round here. Penguins are not intelligent. It is a proven fact about penguins that they:

1. Are too stupid to fly.
2. Waddle (very stupid).
3. Always, always opt for the dealership undercoating.

Penguins get a lot of credit for looking like they wear tuxedos, therefore they must be smart. This is like the mistake people make in believing the British are smart cause they have that funny accent. Tuxedos and accents do not = intelligence. Penguins is practically chickens.

Ray, please don't think my respect for you has diminished in any way when I say that you are completely full of shit.

With their natty tuxedoes, great inner dignity and poor personal hygiene, penguins are the Brits of the animal kingdom. Avian James Bonds, if you will. Tim Burton knew this in his younger, visionary days, but then he got fat and complacent and lost the dream. Very sad.

You know, I think I'm gonna pick up some KFC on the way home tonight. I guess their protest backfired.

It reminds me of the "I'll Eat Three" campaign I saw a while back. (I may have even first seen it on this very site.)

Dear Utron. We are now enemies.

Sincerly,
Ray Midge.

One of my bosses said the same thing about chickens. He worked on summer on a chicken farm and was traumatized by the memory.

Birds: some are pretty, some are tasty, all are evil. You know what the ancestor of birds was, right? Yeah, that velociraptor thing that poisoned that guy on Jurassic Park and ate him while the guy was conscious. Don't think that cute little canary wouldn't do the same to you if he had a chance.

Ray, you such cock.

Penguins are just like chickens (not how I turn off the italics, genius), EXCEPT "except they don't taste good. And they swim a whole bunch better, and their poop smells like rotten fish. And they're monogamous."

In other words, "NOT LIKE CHICKENS AT ALL"

fuck you and the chicken you rode in on

Andrea, I knew a guy in high school who spent one summer working on a turkey farm. Apparently that was also a pretty traumatic experience.

If my friend was to be believed (and most of the time he wasn't), turkeys had to be brought under cover during rainstorms because if a drop struck them on the head, they'd look up to see where it came from and stand there with their silly beaks gaping until their lungs filled with water and they drowned. Compared to the domestic turkey, your typical parakeet is Immanuel Kant.

Dear Hob:

You made my list too, penguinfucker.

Sincerly,
Ray Midge

This is a myth, unfortunately. It'd be hilarious if it were true.

Compared to the domestic turkey, your typical parakeet is Immanuel Kant.

Thank you, utron. With that image, I can die a happy man.

hobgoblin:
I don't know about PETA. But as for myself, I think that "farmer Bob" is not nearly as cruel as a "factory farm". As you've noted, "factory farm" is a scary word. But dude, look at what actually happens in them; it really is sick and wrong. (The pope agrees, if that matters to you.)

It's not the ending of a chicken's life that bugs me. Let them run around the farm and then eventually kill them; fine by me. It's an entire life of serious non-stop suffering that I object to.

Megan:
Yes, they're just chickens. What they're capable of feeling is much less than what, say, a dog is capable of feeling. But wouldn't you consider it immoral to literally torture a chicken? I'm not gonna cry if a chicken gets its head cut off. But what about actual torture? A chicken is a low life form, but it's not an inanimate object, either.

PETA-type silliness aside, our treatment of animals in many modern farms is degrading to us. As children, we knew that such things were wrong. Why do we pretend not to know now that we've grown up?

Like the death penalty, the raising of chickens is not a matter of doctrine settled by the Magesterium. I'll trust that the Pope wants humane treatment of all God's creatures, but like with turkeys (remove the beaks so they don't kill and eat each other---viscious birds), that may seem like cruelty

Keeping chickens in cages isn't "cruel"

Plucking them live is cruel.

Ray, open your heart to penguin-love. Hate not the penguin.

When I was a kid, we had chickens. We kept them in a coop. It wasn't cruel.

Alex, you FREAKING RULE.

Come on, Megan. Who are you going to believe: a coherent and plausible internet source, or a guy I drank beer with when I was sixteen, who now works at the local Piggly Wiggly?

Anyway, I said he wasn't to be trusted.

All this talk of chickens and penguins reminds me of Wallace & Gromit's The Wrong Trousers, with the penguin who put a rubber glove on his head to pretend he was a chicken. He would go out and commit crimes as the chicken, and then lead a normal-person life as the penguin. Of course, in the end, he ended up at the zoo. Go figure.

SJKevin -

To many animal rights activists, the ideal is the Chinese family farm over the factory farm. Those small S China farms where ducks, geese, pigs, chicken, goats and men live in very close, happy harmony and their wild avian friends are welcome visitors.

But those "animal friendly" farms in China are the greatest disease vector and incubator - for flu today, and we think bubonic plague and just possibly cholera, smallpox, and typhus got their start in S China. Mankind's worst diseases, historically, have come out of "animal friendly" farm areas....

The best way to avoid another Flu Pandemic that might kill between 20-200 million people is for China to go with factory farms and end the trans-species incubators of pathogens that jump between various animals in close quarters. Given that massive benefit alone for mankind, objections to factory farms seem weak..

I don't really care about chickens or turkeys - they are too stupid to care where they live.

Cedarford is really ON today:

"Those small S China farms where ducks, geese, pigs, chicken, goats and men live in very close, happy harmony and their wild avian friends are welcome visitors"

Exactamundo!

What the fucktards call "cruelty" is really a safe, sane and reasonable response to processing meat. The chickens aren't gratutously tortured (to the extent a chicken can be tourtured "gimme the information, clucky, or this ciarette's going in your cloaca!")

Yeah, the crunchy set with their idiotic harkening to some mythologic idyllic past is more dangerous (b/c it's more seductive) than their bomb-throwing fellow travellers.

We shouldn't butcher live animals. That's about as far as I'll go.

Look, what happened with those chickens wasn't torture. It was more along the lines of a fraternity stunt, hijinks and such.

Maybe there was humiliation to chicken culture's sense of pride and all, but it seems to me that the bulk of the humiliation actually ended up being mine.

Without, you know, getting into too many details.

My God folks, calm down1

It ain't like PETA is after your beer!

Oh wait... they already are, and the King of Beers at that!

Save a chicken, eat an Ape!

"To many animal rights activists, the ideal is the Chinese family farm over the factory farm."

Yeah. Many animal rights activists are idiots.

None of which makes the disgusting treatment of animals in factory farms remotely acceptable to me. And no, it's not the fact that they're slaughtered, or even the manner in which they're slaughtered (although that's usually pretty sick) which bothers me; it's the way they live their entire lives before they're slaughtered which I object to.

It's a false dichotomy to assume that we must either have Chinese-style SARS farms or factory farms. Why not have modern farms which have a tiny bit of basic human decency and mercy? It's just not very hard to do.

Factory farms can be dangerous, too. Leaving aside the issue of antibiotics in your food(!), just consider that your meat may not even be healthy enough to walk before it's fed to you. You regularly eat meat from animals which had tumors, infected wounds, and diseases (which are a natural result of severe overcrowding). Thus, we got mad cow disease.

Utron asked: "Who are you going to believe: a coherent and plausible internet source, or a guy I drank beer with when I was sixteen"

Depends on how much I've been drinking. :) I'm still on my first sherry of the evening.

Kevin,

you almost had a point, but then you toosed in this:
"Thus, we got mad cow disease."

BZZZZZT.

We get mad cow from feeding practices, not penning practices.

You can cram cows into veal crates until their 500 pounds and they still won't get mad cow.

Give them some BBRRRAAAIIINNNNNSSSSSSS to eat, and BOOM, crazy fucking dairy.

and we do have farms such as you talk about. They're called "most of them."

Not every chicken farmer is Tyson, and you can get your "free-range gamey tough chicken all you want for 3Xs the price. That's what makes the market great.

Stupid but true chicken story...

A friend of mine went to Malaysia, stayed with relatives. They have chickens in their back yard. Apparently the way to catch a chicken is to scare it, it's supposed to stand stock still and you can pick it up. Anyway, he tried and he ended up chasing the chicken around the yard, until it leapt over the fence into the jungle beyond. Before he could decide whether to follow it there was a rustle, followed by a short squack, followed by a loud crunching sound. He would never go beyond that fence.

Jeff over at Beautiful Atrocities has just today uncovered the chicken / Abu Ghraib connection. It's a doozy.

"Why not have modern farms which have a tiny bit of basic human decency and mercy?"

The answer is the use of the word human in relation to our treatment of chickens, young one.

They don't get human treatment because they're not human. They're f'n chickens.

I'm not in to clubbin' baby seals because they're cute. But seriously when was the last time you looked at a chicken and thought "Oh, how cute that chicken is?" Never! Hasn't happened 'cause chickens aren't cute.

And that's why penguins are better than chickens even if they're not different in many respects. Penguins are cuter.

Dick?!? That was so cool. The guy deserves a pat on the back. Now if I'd been there I would've been handing out my famous "Get Thee Behing Me Fired Chicken" recipe

Why are penguins and chickens different?
Chicken has more white meat.

And penguins taste more like California Condor.

"Pardon me, but could you help a fellow American who is down on his luck?"

Dammit, Chicken Thunderdome won't work.
We eat hens, not roosters.

They won't fight.

Dammit.

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"Penguins are practically chickens."

this is probably the funniest gawd damn thing I have ever had the pleasure of reading on the internet. FUCKING FANTASTIC!!

PETA is just another radical special interest group that needs to stop taking themselves so seriously. While I do not condone intentional mistreatment or neglect of any animal, I am certainly not going to slit my wrists over a chickens living conditions in the slaughter house...know why...?

BECAUSE THEY ARE FUCKING CHICKENS.