Move unrelated to Dalai Lama
By BILL WOLFE
bwolfe@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal
KFC has dropped previously announced plans to place restaurants in Tibet, but the decision was unrelated to a letter from the Dalai Lama saying the “corporation’s support for cruelty and mass slaughter violate Tibetan value.”
“We have no plans today to enter Tibet. We did look into entering Tibet earlier in the year, but we decided not to move forward because it isn’t economically feasible for us to do business there today,” company spokesman Jonathan Blum said yesterday after a group supporting animal rights publicized the letter to David Novak, chief executive of KFC parent Yum! Brands.
The decision was made months ago, Blum said.
Michael McGraw, spokesman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said the organization “would be thrilled” if KFC has changed its plan. However, “it’s our understanding that they do intend to expand into Tibet and elsewhere in Asia,” he said.
In the Dalai Lama’s letter, as presented by PETA, the Buddhist leader said he decided to become a vegetarian after seeing the slaughter of a chicken in 1965.
“Tibetans are not, as a rule, vegetarians,” he wrote, because vegetables in the province of China are often scarce and meat forms a large part of the diet. “However, it was considered more ethical to eat the meat of larger animals such as yaks than small ones, because fewer large animals would have to be killed.”
Confirmation of the letter’s authenticity was not immediately available. The New York branch of the Office of Tibet, which represents the Dalai Lama, said yesterday that verification would have to come from India, where the main office was closed for the day.
McGraw said the Dalai Lama’s letter was faxed to Yum on Tuesday. Blum said the company had not received the letter, but “we understand he is a strict vegetarian, so it doesn’t surprise us that he’s opposed to eating chicken.”
McGraw said that the Dalai Lama had contacted PETA’s Asian representative a couple of months ago after reading an article about the organization, and that led to this week’s letter.
PETA has been conducting a boycott and publicity campaign against KFC to protest what it calls unnecessary cruelty in the raising and processing of chickens. It criticized the company yesterday for what it said was a failure to keep promises made last year, when KFC said it was adopting industry-leading guidelines for humane raising and handling of chickens.
Instead, “KFC has done nothing to improve the treatment of animals on the supplier farms and the way they are slaughtered,” McGraw said.
“I don’t comment on PETA’s continuous misstatements or distortions of the truth — it’s simply their attempt to promote vegetarianism, and we’re proud that we sell world-famous chicken,” Blum said.
The Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959 after a failed revolt against Chinese rule. He operates a Tibetan government in exile in northern India.
