I’d like to gauge your opinion on this story about if you feel it needs a content warning for animal cruelty, as one of the comments has suggested.
I was the editor for this story and since it took place in a grocery store and no living animals were present, and anything gross that was discussed was either just implied or incredibly unlikely to actually happen, I didn’t include the content warning. Was I wrong here?
Echoing everyone else here, this absolutely does NOT need an animal cruelty content warning. I’m usually not one to jump on the “we’ve become oversensitive” bandwagon and tend to agree to put warnings where warnings are due, but even I don’t see the point here. If you applied that here, almost every single story would need some kind of a content warning…
(At most, this story could do with an “If you are lucky enough that you don’t know the mentioned movie, do not, under any circumstance, look it up, not even for the reverse psychology effect of this warning. Seriously, you’re better off not knowing that.” warning )
I’d just assumed that the guy was making a bad joke. No animals were harmed in the story (or even present) so a content warning seems pretty unnecessary. Did you receive complaints suggesting otherwise?
Can you warn on “Suggested Animal Cruelty”? Because a terrible act seems to be what the customer means. It’s what we’re imagining.
Also, please note a “Suggested Animal Cruelty” warning for what I’m going to say shortly.
Or you could cut the last five words, or the last ten words, and then we can think this is someone who heard about “turducken” and who wants to do something similar but with only chickens. But without the concepts of live birds. Or specifically, live headless chickens.
Which are a thing.
And then, being less gross, it’s also less of a story.
Why would someone want to make a chicken a centipede? They have a desire for more legs? Would that be the reason for wanting to do that? I don’t eat legs or thighs, but I like the breast meat. But not so much I’d want a hundred breasts on just one chicken.
I hope I didn’t take this off in the wrong direction, but the idea just grabbed me and I wonder what the customer’s intention was?