Ever since American talk show host Oprah Winfrey announced that her website www.oprah.com would be giving away coupons for free chicken dinners, KFC restaurants around America have been literally inundated with people coming with coupons in hand for a free chicken dinner, including two side dishes and a farm biscuit.

The situation has gotten so bad that many stores either ran out of chicken or had to turn people away without honoring the coupon.

Why America’s most popular female talk show host would offer such a deal is beyond the comprehension of most sane people, including those who are against the killing of millions of innocent fowl to satisfy the hunger of these people. The following piece, taken from a website, called www.Kentuckyfriedcruelty.com  sums it up well: KFC suppliers cram birds into huge waste-filled factories, breed and drug them to grow so large that they can’t even walk, and often break their wings and legs.

At slaughter, the birds’ throats are slit and they are dropped into tanks of scalding-hot water — often while they are still conscious. It would be illegal for KFC to abuse dogs, cats, pigs, or cows in these ways.

In addition, it’s now becoming evident that many of these factory farms feed their chickens arsenic, mixed in with chicken feed, as both a growth stimulant as well as to kill parasites.

Fast food chicken establishments are now open in many parts of the Middle East, including: Bahrain. Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the UAE. The arsenic issue is not limited solely the USA, as it has been revealed that small quantities of arsenic were fed as a growth stimulant to chickens in Israel from 2003 to 2006.

Although officially discontinued in 2006, the damage done by three years of eating chickens laced with arsenic has most likely left arsenic residues in many people, which one day could cause cancers and other health problems.

Israel has a very large and well developed poultry industry, with more than 700 poultry farms producing more then 400,000 tons of chicken meat a year.

Chicken is one of the country’s main sources of animal protein; and Israelis are the second largest world chicken consumers, averaging 36 kg per person per year. Much Israeli poultry is also raised on large farms, which also supplies eggs to large supermarket chains.

Due to Jewish Kashrut dietary laws, chickens have to be ritually slaughtered, which many say is much more humane than the American example noted above. That still doesn’t eliminate the problem of feeding hormones and other growth supplements to chickens that between 2003 and 2006 included arsenic as well.

Arsenic was also fed to pigs being raised in Israel, also as a growth stimulant. Free-range chicken,  under the Teva Off brand are now available in Israel it’s doubtful but KFC franchises will use them, due to their smaller size and higher costs.

One reader of her site wrote: “I found it interesting that Oprah would promote KFC after doing a show about the horrors of factory farming.”

::free KFC at Oprah Winfrey