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First, the good news!
After discussions with PETA, Standard Foods Group—the largest Taiwanese health food company and a licensee of PepsiCo’s Quaker Oats Company—became Taiwan’s first major food and beverage company to ban animal tests not required by law, which it had conducted or funded to make human health claims for marketing its products.
In a groundbreaking decision, the company has adopted a new public policy stating that “Standard Foods Group while adapting to international scientific and animal welfare trends will not conduct, sponsor, or entrust/outsource to third-parties to conduct animal testing unless expressly required by regulations.” You can read more about this victory here.
Also following talks with PETA, these companies enacted similar policies to end such animal testing, which they had previously pursued:
Now we need your help to pressure other major food and beverage companies in Taiwan to get with the program and end similar horrific experiments, which collectively have force-fed, electroshocked, drowned, starved, bled, poisoned, dissected and/or killed more than 8,000 animals over the past two decades.
In some of the tests that these companies conducted, funded, or otherwise contributed to—none of which were required by law—experimenters fed mice a common Chinese herbal-medicine blend and chicken essence, starved them for up to 24 hours, and dropped them into beakers filled with water to observe how long they struggled before they drowned or remained underwater for eight consecutive seconds. If the animals learned to float and conserve energy, experimenters would stir the water to force them to struggle. To speed up the drowning process, experimenters tied lead wires to the mice in order to make it harder for them to swim. (Watch the video below of the forced swim test, an experiment used for various junk-science purposes that’s similar to what animals in Taiwan laboratories endure.)
These outliers are on the wrong side of history.
The Taiwan Food and Drug Administration (TFDA)—after receiving scientific comments from PETA and thousands of our supporters’ pleas to end animal testing—recently made historic announcements that scores of vulnerable animals would no longer be drowned or electroshocked in order for companies in Taiwan to make anti-fatigue health claims for food and beverages and that the agency would also now prioritize internationally recognized, non-animal tests for assessing food safety. PETA recently applauded the TFDA’s decision to drop animal testing from its blood pressure health claim regulation for foods after the agency received our detailed scientific critique (submitted at its request) as well as its decision to drop animal testing from its dental health claim regulation for food and beverages after receiving comments from more than 52,000 of our supporters. In addition to pushing for the TFDA to amend a draft regulation to prohibit health food companies from mutilating rats in attempts to make joint-protection health claims, too, PETA is leading a global trend against animal testing—having persuaded dozens of food and beverage companies to end (or commit to never starting) experiments on animals.
The seven companies in Taiwan that recently banned animal testing after hearing from PETA are positive examples that other companies there can follow by pursuing safe human studies instead of tormenting animals.
Please send polite e-mails to the companies below to tell them to stop experimenting on and killing animals for marketing food and beverage products:
Then, use the form below to make a similar request of other major health food companies in Taiwan.