Kentucky Fried Insanity

Today there are some people protesting at the Kentucky Fried Chicken in Eau Claire. It’s really sort of cute the way they’re doing it.

Apparently a bunch of PETA members have taken it upon themselves to dress up as skeletons and stand around in the rain to protest the cruelty of killing innocent chickens.

The protesters are carrying signs that read, “I’d rather be dead than eat Kentucky Fried Cruelty.” I’ll grant them that the slogan is just a little bit clever, but what are they honestly hoping to accomplish other than proving that they’re crazy enough to put on costumes and dance around like jackasses?

I can attest to the cruelty. I’ve seen chickens killed. When I say that I’m sure people picture a chicken factory or a man with a hatchet. To tell the truth, my grandmother used to do it with her bare hands. She’d break their necks then spin them and pop the heads off.

The other chickens watched her do it. They didn’t seem overly disturbed, not even to the degree that I was.

I ate that same chicken later, after it had been plucked and gutted. It was delicious.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I hate PETA. For the most part, it seems like they’re a bunch of self-righteous asshats who value animal rights over human rights.

I can’t help but think that child sweat shop labor in third world countries just might be a more valid reason for protest than the killing of an animal with a brain that weighs less than my fingernail.

These people need to understand that extremism (like dressing up as a skeleton) is not the proper way to win the hearts and minds of a moderate public. If anything, it seems to me that they’re probably scaring more people away from PETA than they are from KFC.

I was speaking with a vegan friend of mind the other day who is amazingly open minded. I say that her open-mindedness is amazing because, in my experience, vegetarians and vegans tend to be very snooty about their eating habits.

There is an undercurrent in the vegetarian community that seems to always be saying, “I’m more pure because I use less animal products than you.” This has always disgusted me. It’s one thing to take on the challenge of avoiding animal products and quite another to hold yourself in a superior air for doing so.

Your diet and clothing choices do not make you better than anyone else, they just make you different from the majority of the American population.

While speaking with the vegan friend whom I mentioned earlier, I was pleased to find that her beliefs were well reasoned. She calls herself a vegan, but is not one in the strictest sense. When I asked why she uses the word if she isn’t a strict non-user of animal and animal tested products, she responded that the label is quite useful when doing things like ordering at a restaurant. People understand what it means and thus she doesn’t have to explain her exact dietary specifications.

I was surprised to find that she is accepting of meats that come from hunted game and family farms. Her main objection is to the factory farms which, over the last few decades, have come to provide greater and greater amounts of the meat, milk and eggs that we consume.

In that sense, she and I are in agreement. She, unlike myself, has put her belief into practice, which I respect. Even more than that, she is not a mouthpiece for her own school of thought. While she might suggest that a person try to consume less animal-derived items, she would never look down on or chastise anyone just because they chose not to.

I find this same general attitude to be applicable in many walks of life. Take religion for example. I have no quarrel with any person of any faith, so long as they avoid trying to sell it to me.

I find this example to be particularily illuminating since it seems that these types of dietary choices are practically a religion for some people, and one of the things my grandmother (the one who killed chickens) taught me, it’s that you shouldn’t talk about religion among strangers because you never know who you’ll offend.

The skeleton KFC protest reminds me in a way of an anti-war protest I went to when I was a freshman in college. I was lucky enough to be at a protest where counter-protesters (war supporters) were present to represent an opposing belief.

Of course, many of the anti-war crowd didn’t feel as blessed as I did that we were part of a representative democracy in action.

What happened is that both sides shouted at each other. The pro-war side held up pictures of soldiers in combat and called the anti-war side traitors. The anti-war side held up pictures of dead babies and called the pro-war side murderers. It reminded me alot of watching senate debates on C-span, only a little bit more civil.

It was as if the two sides were standing on either edge of a canyon. Each was yelling at the other to get to work building a bridge, but no one was picking up tools.

I mentioned converting moderates earlier and think that this is really the key point. In my metaphor above, the moderates would be at the bottom of the canyon wondering what all the shouting is about. Some of them may want to climb the walls, but everyone up top is too busy making noise to reach a hand down and help them. Most are probably just tired of people making all that noise in what was once a peaceful canyon.