Is this chicken too sexy? PETA thinks so.

The "pin-up" style photo of a raw chicken lounging seductively ran in Wednesday's food section of the New York Times along with a story on the appeal of crispy, savory chicken skin. Now the animal cruelty prevention organization is aiming their laser-beam target at the old gray lady.

"When I saw it I just couldn't believe that an editor of The New York Times would find it acceptable," PETA's founder and president Ingrid Newkirk told The Atlantic Wire. "It's downright offensive, not just to people who care about animals but almost to everyone. It's a plucked, beheaded, young chicken in a young pose," she said.

Tina Loit, the Times photo editor who commissioned the shoot didn't see it that way. "That chicken had attitude," she said of the model, who was propped into a come-hither position with the help of weights and wire.

The image was intended as a humorous, eye-catching approach to your standard food fetish art. But PETA's Newkirk is calling it necrophilia.

Maybe he's mad that the Times stole a signature PETA move. For years, their print and commercial campaigns have relied on sex, particularly naked women, to attract media attention. Sex has become so synonymous with PETA, they're launching a pornography site linked, inexplicably, to their animal rights message. So what's so bad about a lounging chicken?

If anything, PETA should be thanking the Times. After staring long enough at the photo of this goose-pimpled, cross-legged, headless lady-harlot, I may never eat another chicken again.
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