The campaign against ‘Frankenchickens’ is gathering pace. The name refers to types of chicken selectively bred for the cheap meat industry.
If a human baby grew at the same rate as one of these chickens, they’d be as heavy as two gorillas by eight weeks old.
That’s one of the questions in a new comedy sketch featuring high-profile UK comedians. Project Slingshot released the sketch as part of its £3m ‘Don’t Buy It’ campaign, highlighting the horrors of factory farming.
The latest instalment in Project Slingshot’s campaign turns its attention to ‘Frankenchickens’, the fast-growing chicken breeds supplied to major UK retailers and restaurant chains.
The Chicken Quiz, hosted by Last One Laughing stand-out star Sam Campbell, and featuring comedians Jon Richardson, Sara Pascoe, and Kerry Godliman, was directed by Simon Amstell. It focuses on the conditions of chickens in British factory farms. The comedians reveal that 90% of UK chickens grow so fast that they can barely stand.
The sketch also satirises welfare claims made on chicken packaging. When Pascoe insists: “You can’t lie on a label”, Campbell replies: “Yeah, you can. People lie on labels.”
It goes on to highlight the reality of intensive chicken farming, including birds spending much of their lives sitting in their own waste, causing painful skin burns. Around 1.1 billion Frankenchickens are grown in these conditions for slaughter in the UK every year.
Accompanying the video, a series of adverts is appearing across the London Underground network, featuring Campbell, Richardson, Pascoe, Godliman and Chris Packham.
Project Slingshot has allocated at least £3m of funding for its campaign against Big Ag this year. The organisation is stepping up pressure to end factory farming by 2040. It plans to increase investment into its campaign to £15m next year. This will place pressure on the food industry to be honest about the practices and outcomes of factory farming and on the government to tackle this damaging food system.
Frankenchickens everywhere
The Frankenchicken ads follow the viral London Underground campaign which challenged the pig industry’s claims that CO2 pig gassing qualifies as “humane slaughter”. Comedians Diane Morgan, Jen Brister and Shabaz Ali, TV’s Dr Amir Khan, and TV personality and athlete Mathew Pritchard fronted this.
Joanna Lumley also supports the campaign and comments:
90% of chickens, pumped full of antibiotics, are bred to grow so fast that their bodies collapse, their legs buckle and their hearts give out. They live for just 35 days, mostly in pain, and yet the industry calls it efficiency. I wonder if the general public would agree, if only they knew. We must ban Frankenchickens now because we’re better than this.
Campaigners coined the term “Frankenchickens” to describe breeds of birds that have been genetically selected to grow unnaturally fast. Today, the vast majority of farmed chickens in the UK reach slaughter weight within 34 to 36 days. Growth rates have increased by over 400% since the 1950s. Estimates suggest almost 90% of that increase is as a result of genetic selection.
Project Slingshot’s co-founder, Naomi Hallum, comments:
Factory farming has broken the chicken. In the UK, almost 90% of the 1.1 billion chickens bred for meat annually are the overbred, fast-growing ‘Frankenchickens’, who are prone to lameness, broken bones, and heart attacks.
They spend so long sitting in their own waste, they suffer painful skin burns that you can still see on chicken meat in the supermarket. Despite this, the industry still expects us to believe that animal welfare is its top priority. Well, we just don’t buy it.
In July, campaign group Anima hit the headlines when it called out Pret A Manger for supplying Frankenchickens across its chain of over 470 outlets in the UK.
Project Slingshot has added to pressure on Pret while also highlighting companies including KFC and Moy Park. KFC dropped its pledge to end the use of Frankenchickens by 2026. Moy Park supplies Frankenchickens to KFC alongside McDonald’s and supermarkets including Tesco, Aldi and Ocado.
More than 750 ads are appearing in 206 London Underground stations. And there are 6,600 more inside tube carriages, for 12 weeks. The stations include Euston, Charing Cross, Liverpool Street, Embankment, and Kings Cross St Pancras.
Featured image via Project Slingshot
By The Canary
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