Twenty Rescued While Billions Suffer: Undercover at a KFC Supplier in Australia

On the night of January 28, 2003, members of the Australian activist group Animal Liberation Victoria entered a KFC chicken supplier facility about 40 minutes north of Melbourne. Their intent was to document conditions and to rescue as many sick and injured chickens as they could from the 160,000-bird factory farm. They were not prepared for what they saw.

The rescue team found tens of thousands of birds, still babies at a mere few weeks of age, crammed into a long barren shed. Many of the birds suffered from broken limbs and organ failure from their unnaturally large size—they had been bred and drugged to grow at a rate many times faster than nature intended, and their bodies just couldn’t keep up. Corpses of the birds who could not endure littered the floor, and the survivors were forced to live amid those bodies.

The rescue team documented the conditions in photos and video (which also contains footage taken at non-KFC suppliers) and took as many of the birds with them as they could carry—20 in all. Only two of the birds could walk—and then only barely. The others could not stand because of the severity of their obesity and crippling injuries. A veterinarian determined that immediate euthanasia was the only option for the majority of the birds. Only two of the hens were able to survive for even a short while despite medical care.

Conditions in such facilities are designed to cause the birds to grow as quickly as possible, heath consequences be damned, and to allow the birds only as much consideration as is necessary to keep most of them alive (a percentage of mortality is factored into the profit margin) and growing for six or seven weeks, at which point they are slaughtered. As the rescuers learned, factory-raised birds have trouble surviving much past this date—their abuse is simply too severe.

Click here to learn about what PETA is doing to compel KFC to adopt guidelines that would eliminate such egregious cruelty.

Click here to learn about how you can eliminate such cruelty from your lifestyle by adopting a vegan diet.