With all the protests over Chick-Fil-A, the one clear-cut winner seems to be Kentucky Fried Chicken, proudly telling, via a John Goodman video, how gay-friendly the company is. But are they animal friendly? Before you run for that original recipe, take a look at KFC’s animal-rights record, which has a long history of horrifying abuse.

In 2004, a PETA employee, who worked undercover at a KFC plant in Virginia, that won KFC’s “Supplier of the Year” award in 1997, secretly videotaped workers, one who, according to the New York Times, was “jumping up and down on live chickens, drop kicking them like footballs, and slamming them into walls, apparently for fun.” The plant had received at least one tip of animal cruelty, but ignored it until the videotape was released.

The undercover investigator told the New York Times that he saw “hundreds of acts of cruelty, including workers tearing beaks off, ripping a bird’s head to write graffiti in blood, spitting tobacco juice into a bird’s mouth, plucking feathers to make it ‘snow,’ suffocating a chicken by tying a latex glove over its head, and squeezing birds like water balloons to spray feces over other birds.”

Still hungry?

KFC terminated the employees shown in the tape, and has made repeated claims that their handling of animals is humane. Their website states that they are “committed to the humane treatment of animals,” and that they take steps to assure they “only deal with suppliers who provide an environment that is free from cruelty, abuse and neglect.” KFC has since claimed PETA wants the world to become vegetarians, and they have been made an unfair target.

In 2011, the New Zealand animal rights group SAFE called KFC’s treatment of chickens inhumane, saying their chickens are “kept in cages with up to 19 birds per square meter, fed antibiotics that lead to overgrowth and three million animals dying of illnesses each year.” KFC denied those claims as well.

In 2012, the site KentuckyFriedCruelty.com released a statement saying “KFC suppliers cram birds into huge waste-filled factories, breed and drug them to grow so large that they can’t even walk, and often break their wings and legs. At slaughter, the birds’ throats are slit and they are dropped into tanks of scalding-hot water—often while they are still conscious.”

There’s so much information and lack of information about how animals are treated, that it’s hard and complicated to know whom to trust. However, we here at GuySpy.com believe that, just because a company says it loves gay people, doesn’t automatically make it a place to get a Happy Meal. One word of advice? Skip the junk food altogether and have a salad—most of us could stand to lose a little weight.