Machipongo, Va., May 2, 2011 /PRNewswire/ - International Respect for Chickens Day is an annual project of United Poultry Concerns dedicated to celebrating the beauty of chickens and protesting the misery of their lives in farming operations. Launched in 2005, International Respect for Chickens Day urges people to do a compassionate ACTION for chickens on or around May 4 – leafleting on a busy street corner, tabling at a local school, church, or shopping center, holding a vegan bake sale, educating colleagues at work. May is International Respect for Chickens Month.

To draw attention to the plight and delight of chickens, United Poultry Concerns will display King-Size Bus posters, starting May 9, throughout the Washington, DC Metro Area proclaiming “What Wings Are For” and “Life Can Be Beautiful-Go Vegan!” UPC will also host a peaceful protest on behalf of chickens at the White House on Saturday afternoon May 7 from Noon to 3pm. We encourage people to join us.

“People flock to Washington, DC in May to see the beauty of spring in the Nation’s capital,” says UPC President Karen Davis. “Our King-Size Bus posters and White House event are great ways to bring attention to the life of chickens and the joy of a compassionate diet. Mother hens and their chicks are traditional symbols of spring and rebirth, but the loving care of a mother hen for her chicks has been destroyed by the brutality of factory farming.”

For a chicken trapped in the world of factory farming, to break out of the shell is to enter a deeper darkness full of bewildering pain and suffering from birth to death. During their terrible 6 weeks of life, baby chicks live in dark, filthy sheds on manure-soaked floors breathing poisonous fumes that burn their eyes so badly they rub their hurting eyes with their wings and let out cries of pain. At the slaughterhouse, the chickens “hang there and look at you and try to hide their head by sticking it under the wing of the chicken next to them. They’re scared to death,” said former slaughterhouse worker Virgil Butler, who became a vegetarian when he could no longer stomach this needless horror.

Shakespeare called the rooster “the bird of dawn and trumpet to the morn.” In Letters from an American Farmer, published in 1782, St. John de Crevecoeur bespoke his admiration for the “gentle hen leading her chickens with a care and vigilance which speaks shame to many women.” The purpose of International Respect for Chickens Day is to affirm the value of these experiences, native to chickens and emblematic of all life, and to encourage people to cherish chickens and Go Vegan.

For more information, contact Karen Davis at 757-678-7875.

United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl. www.upc-online.org