San Francisco radio hosts plan to chase chickens around the studio on Barack Obama’s Inauguration Day, thereby terrifying the birds and making a mockery of the day.
According to the KITS LIVE 105 (San Francisco) website,
Tuesday Morning: Tony (dressed in a chicken suit) will be chasing and trying to catch two chickens in the LIVE 105 studio! Plus The Woody Show wants to find out if chickens will eat….chicken.
Without doubt, being carted to and then chased around a radio station will be extremely distressing to the birds in question. Moreover, mockery is a means by which people distance themselves from animals, in order to make their abuse less ethically troubling. Thus, this event, if allowed to go forward, will not only harm the two birds but also contribute to the callous disregard for animals that facilitates both everyday and extreme abuses of animals.
There are still more troubling components to the allegedly light-hearted on-air tormenting of living beings. Mockery is a means by which people debase not only animals but also people whom they wish to control or exploit. From abusive husbands who make snide public jokes about the women they batter behind closed doors to interrogators who torture detainees by placing under-garments on their heads or making them do “dog tricks,” perpetrators of all manners of violation use mean-spirited mockery as a way to degrade their victims. Public pranks like the one planned by KITS LIVE 105 injure communities by hardening the hearts of all who laugh along.
There is, of course, one more cause for concern about this particular event. Why, on the day that our nation’s first African American president will be inaugurated, will radio hosts be making jokes about eating chicken?
Don’t wait to protest after the fact. Stop this event before it happens. Call the producers of LIVE 105 at (415) 478-5483 and insist that in-studio animal abuse is not funny, on Inauguration Day or any other day.
Update: You can also email The Woody Show at WTR@Live105.com and email the producer Dave Numme at Dave@Live105.com.
The correct phone number is 415.402.6700
Or (to make requests, but you may as well use it for this):
415.478.LIVE
or
1.800.696.1053 (toll free)
T.Kottaris
Canada