You may well already know this, but the separate words for meat and animal are likely because of the Normans; the richer French speakers cooked and ate the animals, so they got French names; the poorer "English" raised the animals and called them by their English/Germanic names.

We do have a word with a French root for chicken, by the way: poultry. As to why the separate name didn't catch on, I can only speculate that it's because chicken are cheap to keep and so the English may have eaten them themselves.

Not all languages have separate words for meat - German perhaps being the most famous. It's slightly disconcerting to walk around a supermarket and see schweinefleisch being advertised.

> Finally if you're going to get people excited about animal rights, it's probably better to mention cows than chickens. To me, Chick-Fil-A's ads suggest eating chicken as a lesser of two evils, without ever saying that eating chicken is evil.

I posted this article to our company #random channel and that was the first reply- better chicken than beef!

Most effective altruists would agree with you (and thus disagree with a possible takeaway from Chik-Fil-A's advertising) that eating chicken is better than cows, as cows provide significantly more meat than a chicken, with ratios being up to 50 chickens per every 1 cow, as far as quantity of meat for normal portions go. In other words, someone eating only chicken may kill X chickens, but someone eating only cows may kill 1/50X cows. Of course there are other variables involved like weighing the differences between these animals, their treatments, lifespans, etc., but it is nonetheless a point with notable weight. Although this isn't quite the area I was getting at, just that the most significant things should be looked at first, all else constant.

pretty sure the ads are just a joke to not eat hamburgers, but to eat chicken whether it be nuggets or sandwiches or whatever which is essentially the menu for Chick-fil-A.