Christopher Alan Cox

PETA is known to have controversial commercials, such as the “Veggie Love” campaign that features barely dressed ladies “playing” with vegetables and exhorting “vegetarians have better sex.” I recently came across the Kentucky Fried Cruelty series created by PETA, and am appalled at what I saw. All three of these commercials have a rustic scary movie atmosphere to them. Here is a quick description of the commercials:

Fried: Shows KFC’s Colonel Sanders walk into a building where a man with a chicken head is sitting in a bathtub watching TV. The Colonel walks over and pushes the TV into the bathtub, and the chicken man gets electrocuted and dies.

Crack House: Again the Colonel walks into a building where there are a number of chicken people on the floor. The Colonel opens up a cage full of these chicken people and throws a handful of illegal drugs on the floor, and the chicken people start grabbing. The Colonel then closes the cage and walks out.

Torture Camp: This one shows the Colonel watching from his fancy car while prison guards beat and kick a chicken man lying on the grounds of a prison yard. The guards start to walk off, and one guard turns back around to get another good kick to the face of the unconscious chicken man before walking off again.

With the innumerable food service businesses in existence, it is tactless that PETA commercials would target a specific food chain, rather than addressing their global position on the issue of animal abuse. Though many can debate whether humans should eat animals or not, there is no debating that these violent commercials are not good for children to watch. If PETA really believes they are promoting non-violent behavior by graphically showing murder, abuse, and drug use, then they have seriously missed the mark.

Do you believe PETA campaigns are effective?

Graphic Credit:
Animationfactory.com