Tag: United Poultry Concerns

Karen Davis Promotes Radio Show Highlighting Her Claim That 9/11 Was a Good Thing

On Friday, August 27, the Howard Stern show repeated a show from April 10, 2002 in which United Poultry Concerns’ Karen Davis defended her comments that the 9/11 terrorist attacks may have reduced net suffering by sparing many chickens. For those who missed her comments the first time, in a letter on Dec. 26, 2001 to Vegan Voice, Davis said,

Doubtless the majority, if not every single one, of the people who suffered and/or died as a result of the September 11 attack ate, and if they are now a life continue to eat, chickens. It is possible to argue, using (Peter Singer’s) utilitarian calculations, that the deaths of thousands of people whose trivial consumer satisfactions included the imposition of fundamental misery and death on hundreds of thousands of chickens reduced the amount of pain and suffering in the world.

Davis has also claimed that Jewish victims of the Holocaust who ate meat were the moral equivalents of their Nazi persecutors (emphasis added),

It’s been said that if most people had direct contact with the animals they consume, vegetarianism would soar, but history has yet to support this hope. It isn’t just the Nazis who could see birds in the yard, slaughter them and eat them without a qualm, and in fact with euphoria. In this respect, the persecuted Jewish communities were no different than their persecutors.

The odd thing is that Davis herself was promoting the re-broadcasting of the Stern show on the UPC web site. Hey, good for her — more people should know that animal rights leaders like Davis think that it could be argued that the 9/11 terrorist attack was a good thing or that Jewish families who ate chicken were just like the Nazis.

Davis is now writing a book length treatment of these bizarre beliefs, The Holocaust and the Henmaid’s Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities, to be published in 2005.

Source:

UPC President Karen Davis Talks about Chickens on The Howard Stern Show. Press Release, Untied Poultry Concerns, August 27, 2004.

Karen Davis: Slaughterhouses Cause All Known Social Problems

In September, four Georgia Southern University students were arrested and charged with burglary and cruelty to animals after they broke into a chicken house and decapitated several animals. The students videotaped their actions which apparently was motivated by a desire to learn if chickens really can continue to move after their heads have been cut off.

In a news story on the arrests, Bulloch County Chief Deputy Gene McDaniel was asked what he thought an appropriate punishment for the students might be and he replied,

I?d like to see them put in about 40 hours at a poultry plant and see if it?s that much fun killing chickens for a living.

This brought an angry retort from United Poultry Concerns’ Karen Davis,

The seven young men and women who reportedly abused chicken and videotaped the abuse should get the maximum punishment for their crimes, as well as counseling. However, putting them to work in a chicken slaughterhouse, as proposed by Bulloch County Chief Deputy Gene McDaniel (perhaps in jest), is an inappropriate punishment if the goal is to rehabilitate them. Killing chickens for a living does fuel cruel and sadistic impulses in many employees, how vent hatred of their jobs on the chickens, their spouses, their children, their neighbors and themselves. Torturing the chickens at the plant becomes a job-related pleasure for many frustrated poultry workers, whose relationships to the birds is, after all, a completely violent one.

Alcoholism, amphetamine use, mental illness, assault with deadly weapons, manslaughter, child endangerment, child abuse, domestic violence and animal abuse are endemic to the slaughterhouse milieu.

For some reason she forgot to blame slaughterhouses for poverty, world hunger and the AIDS crisis.

Sources:

Chicken killings traced to cues in spring kids to be cruel. Press release, United Poultry Concerns, September 12, 2003.

Conyers Teens Charged In Chicken Killings. Barbara Knowles, Rockdale Citizen, September 4, 2003.

How Can Meat and Vegetarian Food Markets Be Rising Simultaneously?

A few weeks ago Karen Davis sent around an e-mail promoting United Poultry Concerns’ annual conference. In the midst of the e-mail was this fascinating paragraph which really does a good job of outlining exactly how much effect the animal rights movement has had over the past quarter century (emphasis added),

Thirteen years later [after UPC’s founding] , the number of animals on US farms is 10 billion, and meat consumption is record high. Government statistics show that in 2000, Americans, per person, ate 195 pounds of red meat, poultry, and fish, 57 pounds above annual consumption in the 1950s. At the same time, “there is a proliferation of vegetarian products,” says food trend watcher Dr. Jonathan Seltzer, and a 2000 consumer report predicted the vegetarian market will grow 100 percent to 125 percent over the next five years, with vegetarian food sales topping $1.25 billion in 2001, thanks to a US vegetarian population of 7 million to 12 million people (Free Press, July 30, 2002).

Seven to twelve million might sound like a lot of vegetarians, but it is a range of only 2.7 to 4.6 percent of the U.S. population.

The size of the vegetarian food market is interesting, however I wonder just how much of that food is being sold to vegetarians vs. non-vegetarians. I know I can’t be the only person in American whose had a Boca burger and a steak in the same week. If anyone knows of any market studies that have attempted to estimate the percentage of vegetarian food sales that are made to non-vegetarians, please e-mail me at [email protected].

Source:

United Poultry Concerns’ Forum on Promoting Veganism. Press Release, Karen Davis, United Poultry Concerns, August 2003.

Karen Davis on Chicken Catching

In June, the Wall Street Journal ran an article about hand vs. machine catching of chickens. On July 2, 2003, the Journal published a letter-to-the-editor from United Poultry Concerns’ Karen Davis (emphasis added),

Chicken catching, whether by hand or by machine, is completely violent. And bruised and wounded birds do not always conveniently go out of sight into livestock feed. They are processed into nuggets and other unwholesome products like sausages and patties.

For the chickens, hand catching versus machine catching is terrorism either way, just one more part of their totally miserable lives.

Source:

Totally miserable lives. Karen Davis, Letter, Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2003.

UPC Planning Its 13th Annual Spring Vigil for Chickens

United Poultry Concerns recently issued a press release announcing its 13th Annual Spring Vigil for Chickens urging activists to protest between April 16 and April 28 for the chickens — and for a low, low payment of just $15, UPC will supply activists with “3 color posters and 100 Chickens Brochures.”

According to the press release,

ONce chickens and eggs were symbols of Life and Spring. Today chickens have become symbols of suffering and death. In the U.S. each year, more than 8 billion baby “broiler” chickens, both males and females, are raised in filth and slaughtered for food. Worldwide more than 40 billion chickens are slaughtered every year. Chickens in the U.S. and Canada have no legal protection. Eery day millions of chickens are paralyzed with electric shocks in slaughterhouses, caged, starved, debeaked, buried alive, trashed at birth, infected with Salmonella, and tortured in laboratories. Chickens are excluded from the U.S. Humane Slaughter Act and the Animal Welfare Act.

UPC will also be holding two protest events in Washington, DC in April, including leafletting at the annual White House egg roll on April 21.

Source:

UPC 13th Annual Spring Vigil for Chicken. Press Release, United Poultry Concerns, March 12, 2003.

U.S. Marines Abandon Use of Chickens as Chemical/Biological Weapons Detectors

The U.S. Marines earned the ire of animal rights activists after it proposed using chickens as a detection system for chemical and biological weapons.

The idea was based on the whole canary in a coal mine idea, that if a chemical or biological agent was released the chickens would become ill and then the soldiers could respond by putting on their gas masks and taking other actions.

Of course there were numerous problems with this rather goofy idea. Apparently the Marines didn’t learn until after they had already started this harebrained scheme that there are chemical weapons that will kill human beings long before they make a chicken ill. Not to mention that the chicken’s feathers would protect them from some chemical or biological agents longer than a human being’s.

And then most of the chickens died pretty quickly. According to Stephens Washington Bureau, 41 of the 43 chickens shipped to Kuwait have already died. So the Marines have put the whole scheme on hold, probably permanently.

Just to be sure, though, United Poultry Concerns’ Karen Davis is urging people to write President George W. Bush and urge him to, “Leave the chickens out of it.”

She’s probably right for a change. Chickens would make a much better meal for soldiers than chemical weapons detectors.

Sources:

‘Operation KFC’ kicks the bucket. Adam Ashton, Stephens Washington Bureau, March 10, 2003.

Observe the chickens of America clucking towards Baghdad. Drew Cullen, The Register, March 11, 2003.