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by Greg Winter
Now, the same advocates are praising Burger King after the company pledged
yesterday to serve meat only from animals that have been housed, treated
and slaughtered with great care.
Following in the footsteps of its larger rival, the McDonald's Corporation,
Burger King said it would begin checking the 160 slaughterhouses from which
it buys meat to make sure that all the animals are carefully stunned before
being killed.
The company said it would also insist that chickens have extra leg room in
their cages, that cows are not branded more times than necessary and that
livestock are not dragged to the slaughterhouse by their limbs when they
fall lame.
The policy goes considerably further than what the law requires or what its
peers in the industry demand.
"We are the caretakers of God's creation," said Rob Doughty, a Burger King
spokesman. "We have a moral obligation to treat them humanely, and, when we
do slaughter them, to do so in a painless manner."
Before killing cattle and swine, slaughterhouses have to render them
senseless first, either by bludgeoning or shocking them with electricity.
But enforcement of the law is so spotty that meat packers can ignore it
"with virtual impunity," according to a petition filed this month by the
union that represents federal meat inspectors.
In 1996, before the large fast- food chains began adopting their own animal
welfare standards, an Agriculture Department study found that fewer than
half the inspected slaughterhouses consistently stunned livestock before
killing them.
After McDonald's started pressing them to do so last year, about 90 percent
of the plants were complying.
"The restaurants are doing a better job than the U.S.D.A.," said Dr. Temple
Grandin, a Colorado State University professor who helped both McDonald's
and Burger King shape their guidelines. "Now it's obvious who supplies a
restaurant that does audits and who doesn't."
The fast-food chains took up the issue with ample encouragement from
outsiders.
For the last nine months, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an
animal-rights organization, has staged hundreds of rallies in front of
Burger King franchises, much as it did with McDonald's before it adopted
its own standards.
Beyond criticizing executives at the annual shareholder meeting of Burger
King's parent company, Diageo P.L.C., the group also enlisted celebrities
like Alec Baldwin and Richard Pryor to demand that the chain "improve life
and death for animals."
After John Dasburg was named Burger King's chief executive in February, the
pressure became a little more personal.
At the group's behest, James Cromwell, the human star of "Babe," a movie
featuring a lovable pig, urged Mr. Dasburg in a letter to "ponder that life
for millions of chickens, pigs and cows raised and killed for Burger King
continues to be hideously cruel."
The letter was published as a full-page advertisement in the local
newspaper in the Minneapolis suburb where Mr. Dasburg had lived.
On Mr. Dasburg's first day of work at Burger King's home base in Miami, a
crowd of protesters and a similar full-page ad in The Miami Herald greeted
him.
The company would not say whether it swayed him, but he took up the issue
right away.
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