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Actor and PETA supporter Maggie Q has written a powerful letter to Shou-Mei Wu, the director general of the Taiwan Food and Drug Administration, urging her agency to revise a proposed regulation suggesting that food and beverage companies conduct painful and deadly experiments on animals so they can make dubious claims about their products' effects on arthritis in humans. Maggie closed her letter with this appeal:
Please ensure that Taiwan stands with the international community in rejecting these crude and absurd experiments on animals.
Will you add your voice to Maggie's by taking action below?
Despite opposition from PETA, the Taiwan Food and Drug Administration (TFDA) is bucking worldwide trends abandoning animal experimentation by proposing new rules that, if implemented, would suggest—and allow—that food and beverage companies conduct painful and deadly experiments on animals in an attempt to support dubious health claims for their products. We need your help to prevent the new rules from taking effect.
The TFDA is accepting comments on its proposed regulation, which would allow horrific experiments that would purposely induce painful arthritis on sensitive and smart rats before they're killed and dissected. Regulators are instructing experimenters to inject chemicals into the joints of adolescent rats or to sever their joint tissue surgically to induce painful osteoarthritis, after which the rats would be starved for 12 hours and then killed and dissected. Pain relief would be intentionally withheld so as not to mask their pain and interfere with the results. All this would be done in a misleading effort to establish human health claims for marketing food and beverage products.
The TFDA's proposed regulation is in direct contrast to worldwide trends that are moving in the opposite direction. Regulatory bodies in the U.S., Canada, and the European Union all require data using humans, not other animals, to support health claims for foods.
Why is the world moving away from the type of experimentation that the TFDA is promoting? Not only is animal experimentation cruel, it's also a colossal failure. Specifically, 90% of basic research, the majority of which are animal tests, fail to lead to treatments for human, and more than 95% of pharmaceutical drugs that test safe in animals fail in human clinical trials.
Rats, a preferred target of experimenters worldwide, are highly intelligent. They are natural students who excel at learning and understanding concepts and are at least as capable of thinking about problems and figuring them out as dogs. They have excellent memories, and once rats learn a navigation route, they never forget it.
The world needs less animal experimentation, not more, to advance human health. Please take action below and let the TFDA know that the proposed regulation must be changed to disallow data from animal experiments.