so how many average people actually care about animal welfare? is it really that many people? most people i know could care less (myself included).

Yeah, better for the chickens to eat each other crap, than to eat food that is healthy for them.

This PC stuff just makes me sick. Back to Hardee's I go!

In the case of the Double Croissant Sandwich (in the picture), forget the well-being of the chickens, think about yourself first!

DOUBLE CROISSAN'WICH™ w/ Sausage, Egg, & Cheese
Calories: 680kCal (34% of recommended daily allowance)

Fat: 51g (80% of daily allowance)
Saturated: 18g (90% of daily allowance)
Trans fat: 3g (trans fats don't happen naturally, folks...your body doesn't know how to properly handle them either)

Cholesterol: 220mg (67% of daily allowance)
Sodium: 1600mg (67% of daily allowance)

i remember all the hippies in college distributing "murder king" stickers. heheh. always thought that was funny.

@mac-phisto: Were these the same people wearing the leather birkenstocks by chance?

In the time it takes to detour to and wait through a fast food drive-thru on my way to work, I can whip up a healtier, cheaper and tastier sandwich in my own kitchen.

And it won't feel like I ate a brick all day long, either.

Finally we can get back to the more wholesome times when herds of wild chickens thundered through the countryside.

Is it me or are the "fast food" lines getting slower & slower? The longest I've waited was 35 minutes in a drive-thru. I would have left, wanted to leave, but with the way it was designed, there was no way to escape the line.

@mac-phisto:
man, I want one of those..... Oh, and I saw that picture when I was eating breakfast.

Man I love me some crossainwiches. And (g'head, call me a animal lovin' hippie) I also love me some animal rights. I won't go turning this into some huge argument, but if we're going to kill them and eat them, we might as well be somewhat nice to them before we do so.

I'm cautiously optimistic about this. I think it's the natural order of things for humans to eat animals (though I don't myself), but I think it's perverse the way animals are treated. I applaud Burger King for taking this first small step. Hopefully this will put pressure on other fast food restaurants and ultimately will affect the supply of American meat and poultry products. Though I oftentimes cringe at having to spend twice as much money to buy cage free eggs at the grocery store, I do so with the hope that increased demand for animal friendly products will eventually change the American farming industry. So kudos to Burger King for sharing this goal (even though I'm sure whoever's behind this is doing it for PR purposes only).

I don't know how accurate this is as I only caught it on one of those top '50 reasons why you shouldn't eat anything' TV shows, but apparently, there's more risk for an egg containing some funky virus if the chicken roams free.

Seems that being able to eat more increases the chickens risk of catching something nasty.

Like I said, don't know the accuracy, and I can't say I really care, just putting it out there.

I'm a heck of a lot more likely to eat at a Burger King now that I know that. I think it's really horrible the way animals are treated on many factory farms. I completely support this decision, I don't eat much fast food, but if I do, from now on, it's Bk all the way...besides, they're the only one that doesn't make me feel sick when I eat there anyway.

"Look favorably"? Is that PR-speak for "do nothing at all"?

It's great that they are doing this. Consumers should care. Chickens have feelings like any pet does, and often are caged with no room to turn around or spread their wings. Then brutally slaughtered after a life of misery and pain so you can eat a McChicken.

I used to work at a company where we would put the chickens in and take them out of the barns. They stuff around six chickens into each really small cage. Usually there are tens of thousands of chickens in each barn. It made me think twice about eggs at the grocery store. That is not the best job for a person becuase you get covered in chicken manure and the barns are really hot and dusty. If you don't feel guilty becuase of how they treat the animals it's at least worth consider how the conditions are for the workers.

The article says they have begun buying 2% of eggs from cageless environments. I'm not hearing a wave of applause from the hen house.

As a vegetarian, I feel my opinion is needed here.

Burger King is at least making an effort (compared to some other burger chains). I can't even have the orange juice at McDonalds because they add beef extract to it to keep it fresh.

Yeah, the animals are still dead. But at least BK is supporting their "right" to a somewhat painless quickie life.

@Wendy Wayrad: Beef extract in orange juice? I'd heard about the fries, but I can't find anything about adding the beefy goodness to OJ.

wile [sic] you eat their unborn...

While I don't think cramping chickens in cages is nice, and it was a strikingly worded statement, I don't think something that has no potential to be born (i.e. commercial eggs, silly putty eggs, etc.) can be called "unborn". It's like calling someone a murderer for aborting a muppet baby™

I'm also cautiously optimistic. I only buy cage-free eggs myself, because I'm scared shitless of all the antibiotics they have to give the caged hens. I don't want that ending up in my food chain.

@JDAC:

I don't want the McDonald's legal department riding my ass... that was a joke!

"Burger King also said it will start getting 2 percent of its eggs from hens that are not confined to small cages. That percentage should more than double by the end of 2007."

that's hysterical. don't they use fake eggs for 99.99% of their breakfast menu?

@Wendy Wayrad: Ah dammit, I knew I'd left my humor switch in the Off position!

@ kimsama: Waht makes you think they don't put the antibiotics in the cage free birds and their eggs?
I'm afraid they might not give the damn things antibiotics. I don't want the hormones or any of that stuff, but hell yeah I want them disease free.

Regardless of the "name" they give the hens (battery, cage free etc), read the small print and often you'll find that the USDA lets them get away with pretty much anything. A key example is "free range", which means they must have access to the outdoors for at least 15 minutes a day. So, you're a chicken, in a big barn running around pecking with 10,000 other chickens, and the farmer comes along and opens a small hatch for you to escape. Do you immediately run away from all your friends? No, because chickens are pack animals. They dont' feel secure outside (with all that unfamiliar farm machinery plus no food and a bunch of animal crap on the ground). So, they just stay inside anyways, but the farmer gets to label his eggs "free range" and charge more for them. If anyone is to blame for this, its the USDA, which has consistently bent over backwards to please large agribusiness like Tyson, ADM et al.

If you really give a crap about animal welfare, you shouldn't be setting foot inside a BK, let alone actually buying any food there. This is just green-washing aimed at the people too stupid to know better.

@vanilla-fro: The problem with all the antibiotics is that they become less effective with overuse. That's why penicillin isn't used widely anymore, even amoxycillin is on the way out.
I don't want my breakfast contributing to the next super-bug being resistant to existing medicines. The worst part is even if I'm not eating all the antibiotics, the rest of the population are so we all all at risk.

Unless you're in the habit of eating raw eggs, bacteria killed by the antibiotics I THINK shouldn't effect you. It'll only effect your wallet in that more chickens will die and you'll have to pay more for the eggs they do get.

@lpranal: lpranal, you beat me to it. But since no one but you and I have seen the problem with the "eat their unborn" statement in the original post, I will post what I was going to say anyway:

Saying that an unfertilized chicken egg is an "unborn chicken" is incorrect. There is no more potential for that unfertilized egg to become a baby chicken than for the egg released by the ovary of a nun who strictly follows her vows of abstinence to become a human baby. If the eggs were not collected and sold, they would simply be trampled and destroyed by the hens anyway, since it would be good for nothing to them. So equating the eating of chicken eggs to the eating of an unborn chicken is illogical and false.

@lpranal: Food eggs are no different than the unfertilized ova that fertile women pass every month, there are folks out there who think that it's essentially abortion for a woman to pass an unfertilized egg, so, yeah. Some people would consider that unfertilized egg you're eating "unborn," if they applied the same logic to chickens as they do to humans.

I was hoping to steer clear of that whole argument by virtue of the fact that nobody (to my knowledge) eats human eggs, but alas I don't think it was enough.

I guess I'm just insensitive, and if I had an immaculately conceived chicken baby of my own maybe I'd understand better. Shame on me

there are EGGS in burger king food?

Don't know whether it's amusing or saddening that some people here couldn't care about the chickens... Hahaha...

Note that I'm by no means a vegan or vegetarian. I eat lots of meat. I just like my animal products coming from happy animals - and sanitary ones... A lot of the time animals that are treated badly are treated in ways that don't make the food great. Like cows standing in their own crap, for example - ick. Generally better for the consumer when these things happen - food's more sanitary, usually (ESPECIALLY beef) - and it tastes better a lot of the time too. Compare regular meat to kosher - kosher tastes AMAZING. Grass-fed burgers are so much better than grain-fed too.

Will say I have huge issues with PETA though.