Get plucked! Denver beats PETA in game of chicken over McCruelty

After a six-month battle to place its McCruelty statue -- a giant maimed chicken -- near the McDonald's on the 16th Street Mall, a fight that involved plenty of legal squawking, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has given up on Denver.

City officials should be lovin' it.

The City Attorney's Office and PETA had been trading legal filings over McCruelty for months, ever since the Denver Department of Public Works determined that the 250-pound sculpture of the bloody bird constituted a commercial sign and would violate Denver rules.

But the city had allowed such efforts before, PETA countered, pointing to the Cow Parade that had business-sponsored bovines marching down the mall. After Denver filed that response, PETA decided that rather than engage in another round of arguments, it would let this campaign fly the coop.

"After several months of trying to work with Denver officials to display our crippled chicken statue on the 16th Street Mall," PETA's Ashley Gonzales says, "we've decided our campaign resources will be better spent working to place the statue in other cities. PETA finds city officials' nonchalant attitude toward freedom of speech and due process to be troubling, but right now we have to focus on our objective: convincing the public to stop paying McDonald's to break chickens' bones and scald them to death."

PETA's concern over the city's callousness doesn't extend to Denver's residents, who still rate praise from Gonzales, just as they did when the protest-pushers initially chose this city for the McCruelty statue, crediting the city's overall niceness. "We have brought our McDonald's campaign...to Denver before and have gotten a very sympathetic response from the public," PETA senior campaigner Ashley Byrne told Melanie Asmar. "We found that people there are compassionate and don't like to see animals suffering."

Now PETA will shop for another city where McCruelty can roost. "We didn't want to keep using our legal team's resources," Gonzales says. "Hopefully, we'll find a home for the chicken somewhere."

Bye, bye, birdie.

Read all about PETA's ten worst publicity stunts here.