Animal Welfare at McDonald's
McDonald's cares about the humane treatment of animals, and we're committed to working with our suppliers and outside experts to continuously improve our standards and practices within our business and across the industry.
Our approach is based on our Animal Welfare Guiding Principles, which express our commitment to ensuring that animals are "free from cruelty, abuse and neglect".
Specific animal welfare practices vary slightly across the McDonald's System, but our practices are always driven by the latest scientific research, advice from respected animal welfare experts, such as those on our U.S. - based Animal Welfare Council or at the Food Animal Initiative in Europe, and potential environmental and food safety implications.
Continuous Improvement
We regularly audit production facilities within our supply chain. Nearly a decade ago, animal welfare expert Dr. Temple Grandin helped develop our audit program for meat processing facilities. Since then, we've conducted over 3,500 audits among our Systems' beef, pork and poultry abattoir facilities. The impacts this program has had on McDonald's and the industry as a whole cannot be overstated.
We also continuously monitor research related to specific animal welfare practices (e.g., broiler stunning, laying hen housing, and sow housing) to ensure that our System is aware of the most up-to-date best practices and how they help guide our global approach.
For instance:
- Currently, McDonald's USA and McDonald's Europe are both actively engaged in learning more about technology improvements for broiler stunning. We will be sharing a report on McDonald's USA findings later in 2009.
- McDonald's USA has joined a coalition to study the animal welfare and other sustainability impacts of different laying hen housing options.
- We continue to find evidence that supports our long-standing position to support suppliers who are phasing out sow gestation crates in our supply chain. Currently, more than 50% of all Cargill's contracted hog farms are in new-generation systems that do not use gestation stalls. Smithfield continues to phase out the use of individual sow gestation crates on hog farms and replace them with group housing. They have already completed surveys on several dozen company-owned farms to determine how to best conduct the conversion process, and the first pigs produced from three new open gestation stall facilities reached market in early 2009.