Environmentalists started a new national ad campaign featuring a giant drug-addicted chicken to pressure fast-food giant KFC to stop abusing antibiotics.
The Natural Resources Defense Council deployed a new cartoonish character, called Auntie Biotic, to lead the pressure campaign. Auntie wears a T-shirt that reads “KFC: Get Your Chickens Off Drugs.”
In a web ad, Auntie, the giant six-foot-tall chicken covered in giant antibiotic tablets, protests outside of a KFC, explaining that the company continues to use harmful amounts of anti-viral drugs in its poultry that encourage bacteria and germs to grow stronger.
The group asks its supporters to email KFC’s CEO Roger Eaton in a form letter outlining their concerns.
The letter frames KFC as an outlier compared with other fast-food chains that have pledged to limit antibiotic use. Overuse of antibiotics for animals in the food supply, as a way to make them bigger, has been blamed for the growth of drug-resistant bacteria that is making animals and humans sick.
“Factory farms give antibiotics to chickens that are not even sick to help them grow faster and survive crowded, unsanitary conditions,” the NRDC said. “The result: the spread of drug-resistant superbugs that are reducing the effectiveness of antibiotics and making infections in people harder to treat.”
McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A, Subway and Taco Bell have pledged to curb their “overuse and misuse” of antibiotics, the group points out, while KFC has not followed suit.
