Culture

A Chicken In Perth Is Being Forced To Learn To Tweet In English, To Promote A Fast-Food Chicken Franchise

Whoops, that's your horrifically misdirected PR stunt.

by Steph Harmon  15 October 2015

Want more Junkee in your life? Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook so you always know where to find us.

This is Betty.

help

Betty is a chicken who appears to be stuck in an uncomfortable-looking room somewhere in Perth, with a fake dryer, a small lamp, and a working computer.

betty

Betty is trying her tiny little chicken heart out to learn how to Tweet in English, but she is doing none of this of her own accord.

Betty has been forced into free labour under the iron fist of her owners, as part of a PR stunt to promote their company: a fast-food chain in WA that trades in Betty’s species. This is their mascot. It is also a chicken.

Eat me, jerks.

Once she manages a five-letter word, Betty will make the Guinness Book of World Records as the first chicken to tweet. And maybe she’ll finally be freed from this arduous task.

It could take weeks. It could take months. The way things are going, it will likely take years. [UPDATE: The campaign only goes for 30 days, so years is unlikely.]

Here she is this morning, trying to type the word ‘help’:

She has been doing this for over a week already.

Things aren’t going well for Betty.

She is slowly losing her mind.

In the world of horrifically misdirected PR stunts, getting the public to root for a personified chicken stuck at a computer for over a week, as she is forced to find a way to express herself in terms we understand — in order to promote a fast food joint that trades in one of the least humane industries in Australia, so they can cheaply sell more of that chicken’s chicken-friends with pineapple fritters and a serve of fries… Well look, there’s some complicated messaging happening right there.

*’Mad World’ by Gary Jules plays softly in the background*

Good luck, Betty.

Good luck, everyone.

–

NB: A PR agency looking after Chicken Treat have contacted us to let our readers know that Betty is not owned by the franchise; rather, she’s a domestic pet chicken belonging to a family from Perth. “In no way is she being forced into anything,” they note. “She is much-loved and has an entire grassed backyard to roam around.”