Environmentalists have created a six-foot tall, drug-addled chicken puppet to pressure fast-food joint KFC to stop overusing antibiotics on chickens.
The ad campaign, created by environmentalist group Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), features a human-sized chicken named Auntie Biotic wearing a T-shirt with “KFC: Get Your Chickens Off Drugs” inscribed. Auntie can be seen in the ad standing outside a KFC covered in antibiotic tablets while ranting about how the restaurant uses harmful drugs that help dangerous bacteria grown stronger in chickens.
“When antibiotics are given to thousands of birds routinely, some bacteria may survive, become resistant to antibiotics, thrive in the absence of competition, and spread to people,” the NRDC wrote on its website. “Those resistant bacteria can live on raw chicken meat, ride along with manure that is spread on far-off fields, and jump to workers.”
According to the NRDC website, KFC competitors McDonald’s, Subway, Taco Bell, Chick-fil-A, and Chipotle have made a commitment to dial back its use of antibiotics in poultry.
NRDC’s beefed up campaign to alienate KFC from fellow fast-food joints comes as the company, owned by fast-food conglomerate Yum! Brands, promised it intends on following the Food Drug Administration’s antibiotic phase out plan.
Still, KFC’s promise to ratchet down its antibiotics use over the long-term has not satiated the group’s concerns.
“KFC’s antibiotics policies are not finger lickin’ good for public health,” Lena Brook, a food policy advocate for the group, said in a press release. “With fast food restaurants increasingly serving meat raised with better antibiotics practices, KFC is lagging behind competitors like Chick-Fil-A and its sister company, Taco Bell.”
She added: “As the nation’s largest fast food chicken chain, KFC has an opportunity and responsibility to help stem the growing epidemic of drug-resistant infections by cleaning up its antibiotics policies.”
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