An animal rights group yesterday appealed to the public to pressure McDonald’s restaurants in Taiwan to stop using battery-cage eggs and also urged other fast food chains to improve the welfare standards of animals used in their products.
“A publication by McDonald’s Taiwan in August 2013 claimed that the company is always looking for the best products and it chose Kaohsiung-based Shih An Farm (石安牧場), whose hens are kept in conditions that conform to European Union standards, as its main egg supplier in Taiwan,” Environment and Animal Society of Taiwan director Chen Yu-min (陳玉敏) told a press conference in Taipei yesterday morning.
The advertisement said that McDonald’s, “treats hens as if they are human, because only a physically and mentally satisfied hen can lay ‘good eggs.’” Chen said.
Photo: Wu Hsin-tien, Taipei Times
However, only months later, the animals rights group discovered that McDonald’s Taiwan had secretly changed suppliers and were using to battery-cage eggs provided by Tainan City’s Fu Ting Co (福頂企業) and Taipei’s Shih An Co (食安行), Chen said
“Fu Ting is an affiliated company of Weichuan Co (味全) which keeps about 120,000 hens in battery cages, while Shih An Co is an egg seller that purchases eggs from three chicken farms that also use battery cages,” Chen said.
As evidence, the organization showed footage from one of the three farms, with five chickens confined to each cage, they are forced to stamp on one another and are unable to spread their wings in the limited space.
“These images are not only are a far cry from what McDonald’s Taiwan described in its 2013 material, but are also evidence that the fast food giant had violated Article 28 of the Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation (食品安全衛生管理法) by misleading consumers through false advertising,” Chen said.
Chen went on to say the company is hypocritical, as on the one hand, it established Ronald McDonald House Charities Taiwan to provide temporary housing for children living in remote areas undergoing cancer treatment, while on the other hand, the eggs from one of its suppliers were found by the Food and Drug Administration last year to be contaminated with Florfenicol, a synthetic antibiotic known to cause liver and kidney damage.
Chen said a free-range egg only costs NT$3 more than a battery-cage egg, which, based on the estimate that McDonald’s Taiwan uses 80,000 eggs per day, would cost less than NT$100 million per year (US$3.18 million).
“I don’t believe that is too costly for a corporation with more than NT$16.4 billion in net sales in 2013, of which NT$460 million was squandered on advertising,” she said.
In response, McDonald’s Taiwan said in a statement issued late yesterday that all the hens of its egg suppliers were reared in accordance with national regulations.
“In addition, every batch of our eggs are tested for about 70 types of animal drugs and the test results show all our products meet the government’s standards,” the firm said.
McDonald’s reassured the public of the quality of its eggs, while it pledged to solicit public opinion about the use of “animal welfare eggs.”
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