Taiwan FDA Ends Animal Tests for Joint Health Claims by Food Companies After PETA Push

For Immediate Release:
July 3, 2025

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Today, the Taiwan Food and Drug Administration (TFDA) finalized its joint protection health claim regulation and removed animal testing as an option for companies attempting to establish such claims for marketing foods in Taiwan, after hearing from PETA.

The move follows the agency soliciting PETA’s detailed scientific critique and getting e-mails and petitions from more than 125,000 supporters from PETA, PETA Asia, and our partner organization in Taiwan, Kindness to Animals. The TFDA also received a powerful letter from actor and PETA supporter Maggie Q, accepted a joint statement from four major science organizations, and witnessed a demonstration and petition delivery by Kindness to Animals, which included a joint statement from more than 100 Taiwanese scientists and health experts.

The TFDA previously instructed experimenters to inject chemicals into rats’ joints or to sever their joint tissue to induce painful osteoarthritis, feed them the test foods, measure their pain without pain relief, starve them for 12 hours, and kill and dissect them. According to the TFDA’s final joint protection health claim regulation (in Mandarin here), marketing statements indicating relevant results must now be based solely on safe and effective human studies.

Actual photos of one of the procedures in a previous version of TFDA’s draft regulation show how rats are drugged, cut open, crippled by severing their joint ligaments, imprisoned in cramped cages, killed, and dismembered.

“The TFDA did the right thing in ending the mutilation and torment of animals, all for the sake of a food-marketing claim,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA celebrates this win for rats and urges other companies that still experiment on animals, like Taiwan Sugar Corporation, to take note and move to human-relevant research.”

Following PETA pressure, the TFDA has made numerous improvements. Countless animals are no longer drowned or electroshocked, bred to develop hypertension, fed sugar and bacteria to develop dental decay, fed an iron-deficient diet to develop anemia, or have their ovaries cut out and fed a calcium-deficient diet to induce osteoporosis for companies to make anti-fatigue, blood pressure–lowering, teeth health, blood iron or bone health claims for food and beverages. The TFDA now prioritizes internationally recognized, non-animal tests to assess food safety.

PETA is now pushing Taiwanese food and beverage companies to ban experiments on animals. In tests funded by Taiwan Sugar Corporation, experimenters repeatedly force-fed mice caterpillar fungus, injected them with allergens that caused extremely painful reactions, and took their blood before breaking their necks to kill them, and dissected them. In another test, experimenters fed malt to mice bred to become diabetic, repeatedly starved them, and took their blood. None of these experiments are required by law.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information about PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram..