The Progressive Animal Rights Alliance of Santa Cruz works to reduce suffering among both human and non-human animals, with the primary goal of educating people about the cruelty inherent in the many commonly-accepted ways animals are exploited and abused in our society.

Internationally, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has a campain website called KentuckyFriedCruelty.com asking KFC to eliminate the worst abuses that chickens suffer on the factory farms and in the slaughterhouses of its suppliers, including live scalding, life-long crippling, and painful debeaking.

There were about a dozen people at the demonstration on Mission St. in Santa Cruz on October 2, World Farm Animals Day, to protest KFC. Mission St. is also Highway 1 and there were a lot of people that honked in support of the demonstration. Informational flyers were passed out to passing motorists, as well as customers who were both entering and leaving KFC. This particular demonstration lasted about an hour, and by the time we left, there were only two customers in the restaurant.

At one point, I was standing on the sidewalk and looking inside the KFC when an employee, shown below sitting with a red shirt at a table, flipped me the bird - you know, gave me the middle finger. I was quite amused by this so I walked up to her and asked her if she wanted to do that again for the camera. She declined and told me she was going to sue me.

But I have to say, the KFC employee of the day award goes to the manager for running after me and kicking me in the upper thigh. It is too bad that Amy, a film student at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, had stopped filming just seconds prior to him kicking me. However, for what it's worth, she recorded a statement saying that she witnessed the manager kick me. You can listen to the audio file called "amy_10-2-05.mp3" below and see a photo of the manager running just before kicking me.