How many chickens become the KFC chain’s fried meals every year?

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the animal welfare group, begins a global boycott of KFC to seek an improvement in the lives and deaths of 700 million chickens who become the chain’s fried meals every year. The group plans to start a campaign pressing the chain to change how chickens are raised in large farms in the United States and around the world. Among the suggestions are to improve the diets of hens and to gas chickens to sleep before they are slaughtered.
     This is not the group’s first campaign to improve chickens’ lives—it has won concessions from McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s. But it is the, group’s first effort to focus on restaurants worldwide.
     With fat people trying to sue fast-food restaurants for helping to cause their obesity, the group hopes to tap into the growing public criticism of a fast-food diet as well as the concern over farm animal welfare. Instead of following the slow path of pushing for changes in regulations, the group wants restaurants to enforce immediate changes by telling farmers they will not Buy chickens raised and killed under current conditions.
     "If people knew what happened to those chickens, raising them in their own filth and then dumping them on an assembly line to have their throats cut when they’re still alive, they wouldn’t go to Kentucky Fried Chicken," a spokesman for the group, Bruce Friedrich, said.
     Officials of the KFC Corporation declined a request for an interview and would not respond to the accusations from the group. Instead they issued a statement. "KFC is committed to the well being and humane treatment of chickens and we require all of our suppliers to follow welfare guidelines developed by us with leading experts on our Animal Welfare Advisory Council," the statement said. "Our suppliers ensure strict compliance with our guidelines."
     Ian Duncan, a member of the advisory council and chairman of animal welfare in the department of animal and poultry sciences at the University of Guelph in Canada, said the animal welfare group may have a point. "I’ve been doing research into chicken welfare since 1965 and change has been slow, very slow," Mr. Duncan said in a telephone interview. "PETA is very extreme and they exaggerate, but maybe that’s what it takes," he said. "I used to be very much against them, but I can see they are getting things done."