Tag: Chrissie Hynde

Chrissie Hynde Bemoans “Tyrannical” Animal Rights/Welfare Campaigns

This Belfast Telegraph profile of Chrissie Hynde is a bit odd. In it, the Belfast Telegraph quotes are as being critical of “tyrannical” and “very judgemental” folks in the animal welfare community.

“As much as I support anyone who is concerned with animal welfare, I think it has become almost a little tyrannical, where people are very judgmental about what you wear, what you eat.

“It’s almost on the verge of polarising people rather than mobilising them, because people have this almost messiah or jihad complex: if you don’t do it the way we want you to, we’ll kill you.

“It has to be inclusive. As soon as you make people feel they can’t be part of it because they have a leather belt, then you’ve lost a lot of people.”

Let me be clear that this is certainly a welcome (and accurate) critique of some of the more sanctimonious animal rights/welfare campaigns.

On the other hand, Hynde herself was often a frequent purveyor of such rhetoric, suggesting herself at one point that animal/environmental rights activists might have to resort to murder to make any lasting changes.

The last resort is for someone to go in and actually take these guys out. Maybe it will have to be an out-and-out assassination. When no one will listen anymore, then individuals have to take the law into their own hands and it can get very ugly.

It is interesting she’s now willing to accommodate people with leather belts, when she was arrested in 2000 for using a knife to destroy leather and suede clothing at a Gap store. I’m sure those sort of antics helped drive people away from animal rights/welfare campaigns in the same way she seems somewhat alienated by such antics today.

If she’s changed her mind about those actions, that’s great. But she seems to imply that it’s other people who are judgmental and tyrannical rather than re-evaluating her own past actions.

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road . . . In a Wheelchair?

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals seems to be running out of ideas. Consider this rather lame protest planned against KFC,

A giant wheelchair-bound “chicken” will repeatedly cross the road in front of a local KFC to lead a protest against the companyÂ’s abusive treatment of chickens. Other PETA members will distribute leaflets to passersby, and one activist will wear a body screen TV showing shocking video footage of factory-farming abuse . . .

. . . Chickens are excluded from the only federal law that protects farmed animals—the Humane Slaughter Act. KFC drugs and breeds chickens to grow so large that many become crippled from the weight of their massive upper bodies.

Get it? Chickens are crippled by their weight, so the chicken has to cross the road in a wheelchair. Yeah, Ingrid, whatever.

Bruce Friedrich provides the obligatory quote,

KFC stands for cruelty in our book. If KFC employees abused cats or dogs the way they abuse chickens, they could be thrown in prison for felony charges of cruelty to animals.

Yeah, and if the average undergraduate abused logic half as often as PETA, he or she could flunk out of college in just a couple semester.

BTW, since PETA is so insistent these days that it has nothing to do with violence or terrorism, it is worth pointing out that the press release notes that PETA has received support from a number of celebrities including Chrissie Hynde. You remember Chrissie — she’s the one who a few years ago provided a justification for murdering those involved in animal industries,

The last resort is for someone to go in and actually take these guys out. Maybe it will have to be an out-and-out assassination. When no one will listen anymore, then individuals have to take the law into their own hands and it can get very ugly.

Can’t imagine where people get the idea that PETA advocates for and approves of violence.

Sources:

Giant ‘chicken’ in crosses the road to protest KFC in Reading. Press Release, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, January 3, 2006.

Chrissie Hynde Is Sad — Thank Goodness She’s Not Angry, As That Could Be Murder

Chrissie Hynde is angry at Benetton over that company’s use of wool from merino lambs.

Hynde and other animal rights activist charge that the practice of mulesing, in which skin is removed from around the anus of lambs without the animals receiving any sort of anaesthesia. Activists claim the practice is cruel, farmers say its causes no more pain than castrating or tail docking an animal.

Hynde sent a letter to Benetton which said, in part,

I was deeply upset to learn fro my friends at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) about the extreme suffering of merino lambs and sheep in the Australian wool industry.

It saddens me to learn that Benetton, a company that I have always thought of as holding high standards of human and animal welfare, has refused to stop buying cruelly obtained Australian wool.

Thank goodness Hynde is just sad. When she gets angry enough, it could be murder, as she said in 2002,

The last resort is for someone to go in and actually take these guys out. Maybe it will have to be an out-and-out assassination. When no one will listen anymore, then individuals have to take the law into their own hands and it can get very ugly.

Perhaps not as ugly as Hynde, but you get the idea. Apparently the mulesing situation is not yet assassin-worthy in Hynde’s view (though it would be nice if she would, in the future, give us an indication on each issue as to just how close it is to assassination time).

Source:

Hynde slams Benetton for animal cruelty. ContactMusicNow.Com, March 22, 2005.

Chrissie Hynde Leaves Message for P&G Employees

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals somehow got list of about 13,000 Proctor & Gamble phone numbers and in July left all of them a voice mail message recorded by Chrissie Hynde.

In the voice mail message, Hynde said,

Don’t think these tests [performed by P&G-owned Iams] are necessary or required by law. They aren’t. Other companies test in other ways.

For some reason, Hynde left out her final solution to the animal testing problem,

The last resort is for someone to go in and actually take these guys out. Maybe it will have to be an out-and-out assassination. When no one will listen anymore, then individuals have to take the law into their own hands and it can get very ugly.

And trust me — Hynde and PETA are certainly experts when it comes to ugliness, both moral and otherwise.

Source:

Hello P&G? It’s Chrissie. The Enquirer (Cincinnati, Ohio), July 8, 2004.

PETA Launches KFC Campaign

In January People for the Ethical Treatment of animals launched a global boycott of KFC aimed at convincing the company to change its policies regarding who it buys chickens from. So far the KFC down the street doesn’t exactly seem to be suffering, but your mileage may vary.

According to the New York Times, KFC purchases about 700 million chickens annually. PETA wants KFC to require its suppliers to improve the diets of breeder hens and gas chickens before they kill them (hmm . . . I suppose they got that idea from their “Holocaust on a Plate” campaign).

Bruce Friedrich told the NYT,

If people knew what happened to those chickens, raising them in their own filth and then dumping them on an assembly line to have their throats cut when they’re still alive, they wouldn’t got to Kentucky Fried Chicken.

As the NYT notes, the campaign worked against Burger King and McDonald’s, so PETA seems to be trying KFC on for size. KFC may give in at some point as well, but it should be noted that McDonald’s and Burger King have a much higher media profile than does KFC. Both the Burger King and McDonald’s campaigns were covered regularly by national media, whereas the KFC campaign seems to have received far less coverage.

The NYT interviewed an independent expert on chickens, University of Guelph in Canada poultry sciences adviser Ian Duncan, who had a very odd response (emphasis added),

I’ve been doing research into chicken welfare since 1995 and change has been slow, very slow. PETA is very extreme and they exaggerate, but maybe that’s what it takes. I used to be very much against them, but I can see they are getting things done.

I wonder if Duncan would buy the same explanation from a student who “exaggerated” on a class project or paper. “Well, it did get the job done, Dr. Duncan, and that’s what’s important, right?”

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the National Chicken Council told the NYT,

PETA’s objective is not to improve animal welfare but to eliminate the use of food from animal sources. A proper concern for animal welfare is already well established in he broiler chicken industry.

PETA has been holding occasional protests against KFC ever since, including everyone’s favorite advocate of murder for the cause, Chrissie Hynde, at a March protest in Washington, DC. Hynde and other activists stood outside a KFC chanting such witticisms as,

KFC what do you say? How many chickens did you kill today?

Gee, that’s almost as clever as Hynde’s line about how it may take the murder of a researcher to get people’s attention. Ah, those nutty celebrities. (For those counting, the answer to that question would be 1.9 million per day assuming the NYT’s figure is correct).

Sources:

Group says it will begin a boycott against KFC. Elizabeth Becker, The New York Times, January 6, 2003.

‘How Many Chickens Did you Kill Today?’. KOMO-TV, March 9, 2003.

Chrissie Hynde: It May Take Murder for Animal Rights Message to Get Through

According to the Center for Consumer Freedom, celebrity animal rights activist Chrissie Hynde tells an interviewer in Pulse magazine, that animal rights activists may have to up the ante to effect the changes they desire,

The last resort is for someone to go in and actually take these guys out. Maybe it will have to be an out-and-out assassination. When no one will listen anymore, then individuals have to take the law into their own hands and it can get very ugly.

Apparently Hynde is just another James Charles Kopp wannabe.

Source:

She’s Not Pretending. Center for Consumer Freedom, December 16, 2002.