Food Companies Kill Animals in Taiwanese Labs for Health Marketing Claims

First, the good news!

After discussions with PETA, Taiwan-based company Standard Foods Corp.—the largest Taiwan health food company and licensee of PepsiCo’s Quaker Oats Company—became that nation’s first major food and beverage company to ban animal tests not required by law, which it 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 it “does not support, fund, or conduct animal research.” You can read more about this victory here.

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 used more than 8000 animals over the past two decades.

In some of the tests that these companies conducted, funded, or otherwise contributed to—none of which are 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 is 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 electrocuted in order for companies there 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. In addition to pushing for the TFDA to amend a draft regulation to disallow health food companies from mutilating rats in attempts to make joint protection health claims, PETA and its international affiliates are also 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.

Standard Foods’ ban on animal testing is a positive example that others in Taiwan can follow by pursuing safe human studies instead of tormenting animals in order to support health claims for marketing foods and beverages.

Please take action today and tell the major remaining health food companies in Taiwan to stop experimenting on and killing animals for marketing food and beverage products.