Taiwan’s McDonald’s fast food restaurants should join branches worldwide in reducing the use of battery-cage eggs, animal rights advocates said yesterday in a protest outside the company’s national headquarters in Taipei.
More than a dozen protesters in chicken costumes marched in front of the McDonald’s headquarters, calling for the company to stop abusing chickens and to use free-range eggs.
Several protesters squeezed into a mock wire cage while singing an altered version of the song I Want Happiness (我要快樂) by Taiwanese singer A-mei (阿妹).
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
“Taiwan’s McDonald’s has not used its marketplace leadership to improve animal welfare standards,” Environment and Animal Society of Taiwan director Chen Yu-min (陳玉敏) said, blasting the company for failing to follow stores in the US, the UK and other nations moving to require that non-battery eggs are used in their cooking.
About 250,000 chickens are needed to meet the company’s daily demand for more than 80,000 eggs, she said, adding that battery cages are unsanitary and inhumane.
“The chickens do not even have space to spread their wings and spend their entire lives stepping on one another,” she said, adding that the company could easily replace battery-cage chickens with “enriched-cage” chickens, which include perches and space for chickens to scratch and lay eggs.
Enriched-cage eggs would cost about NT$4 more than NT$8 battery-cage eggs, she said.
McDonald’s said that it was compliant with national food safety regulations.
“There is a relatively small supply of barn and free-range eggs available on the domestic market,” McDonald’s said, adding that it would continue to evaluate trends within the industry.
It denied that the images shown by activists were taken from suppliers, adding that its suppliers use wet pad cooling system chicken houses.
“A battery-cage system is a battery cage — regardless of whether it is in an open or closed environment,” Chen said, stating that battery cages are still used in the water-sheet enclosures.
She said that about 900,000 free-range, barn or enriched-cage eggs are produced nationally every day.
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