Feathers are flying in
KFC chicken-abuse scandal

I was so upset by the secret video taken of employees of a poultry supplier to KFC kicking chickens and tossing them against walls that I went out and bought a box of honey barbecue wings and a bucket of extra crispy.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a sensitive guy. That's why I did it. I just couldn't bear thinking that those abused chickens had given their lives in vain. Not that the chicken parts I bought had come from abused chickens. Chickens in Hawaii are treated humanely before they are, well, dispatched. They get to listen to soft music (mostly comforting ballads by Don Ho and Bobby Darrin), take field trips to the beach and spend quiet evenings in smoking jackets discussing the issues of the day (Iraq, the Dewey decimal system and whether pork actually is the "other" white meat).

But on the mainland a huge chicken-abuse scandal surrounds KFC (which used to be known as Kentucky Fried Chicken before their lawyers advised them to "avoidway the ickenchay ingthay." Most youngsters won't recognize that as pig Latin for "avoid the chicken thing" any more than they know what the initials KFC stand for. Why KFC employs lawyers who speak pig Latin instead of the run-of-the-mill "E Pluribus Unum" kind of Latin is a mystery).

THE SCANDAL surrounds a secret videotape made by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the animal-rights group that believes people should not eat animals at all but if they are going to, they shouldn't beat up the critters first. I agree. If we are going to consume the lesser creatures of this earth (I use the term "lesser" in the poundage sense, i.e., they weigh less than we do, not in the "we are more highly developed, chickens can't do math" sense), we should at least let them die with dignity. (Man, that was one complicated sentence, but I think if you go back and diagram it on the chalkboard, you'll find it was grammatically correct.)

What I'm trying to say is that chickens should not be abused before they are violently de-feathered, cut into pieces and plunged into boiling hot oil.

While the PETA video of chickens being kicked and stuff is really, really outrageous, I understand that a video crew from the another rights group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Vegetables, infiltrated KFC produce producers and have disturbing shots of farmers playing soccer with heads of cabbage later used in KFC coleslaw. I haven't seen the video, but I'm told the scenes of vegetable abuse are extremely hard to watch ... heads of cabbage being long-kicked into opposing goals, onion-juggling by field hands, and migrant workers poking at the eyes of potatoes with sticks.

The only items on KFC's menu that are not the subject of humiliation and ill treatment are the biscuits, although UFO enthusiasts allegedly have aerial photographs of obscene crop circles carved into the wheat fields of farms that supply flour to KFC.

(As for KFC "gravy," nobody seems to care where it comes from because it isn't considered an actual food product by most people.)

Whether KFC can survive these scandals remains to be seen. KFC's lawyers apparently are advising the company to mimic Teresa Heinz Kerry and tell PETA, PETV and the UFO nuts to "oveshay itway."