‘Bad Chicken’ at University of Canterbury Prompts PETA to Offer Vegan Chicken

Christchurch – Following reports from the University of Canterbury that more than 100 of its students fell ill in a suspected case of food poisoning after eating bad chicken souvlaki at their halls of residence, PETA sent a letter to Chancellor Amy Adams urging her to remove bird flesh from campus menus. The group also offered to send the university some vegan chicken should she agree.

“As your students have experienced first-hand, chickens have pathogens such as campylobacter and salmonella in their gut, which can contaminate their flesh – but more importantly, every chicken is an individual with a unique personality who experiences love, joy, pain, and fear and doesn’t want to be hacked to bits for a meal,” writes PETA Senior Policy Advisor Mimi Bekhechi. “PETA urges the University of Canterbury to protect students and birds by replacing avian flesh with delicious vegan upgrades.”

“Chickens are curious, social birds, who are as intelligent as mammals, but in New Zealand, some 124 million of them are killed for their flesh annually. Most are raised on factory farms where they’re confined to dark sheds that hold around 40,000 birds, giving each individual a space smaller than an A4 sheet of paper in which to live,” writes Bekhechi. “At just 6 weeks old, they’re shackled upside down and electrocuted, then their throats are slit .”

In addition to involving immense cruelty, raising and killing birds and other animals for their flesh has catastrophic consequences for the environment and creates breeding grounds for zoonotic diseases such as avian flu.

PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.au and follow the group on Facebook and Instagram.

Contact:

Sascha Camilli [email protected]

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