“I really do feel emotional about these animals and the unnecessary suffering,” billionaire investor Carl Icahn said about the treatment of pigs by fast-food company McDonald’s.
During an interview with Bloomberg on Wednesday, the 86-year-old Icahn said that McDonald’s had not lived up to prior commitments on animal welfare.
Pigs are put in a tiny crate for their whole life, and they can’t move around, he said. Icahn said McDonald’s promised ten years ago to stop buying pig meat from suppliers who keep their animals in tiny cages, so-called gestation crates.
McDonald’s “did a little something but never delivered,” Icahn said, adding that he was pissed off when he learned the company had not followed through.
Icahn recently bought around 100 shares in the fast-food restaurant company. He is pushing McDonald’s to treat pigs better, expecting the use of gestation crates to be banned entirely.
McDonald’s said in a statement it previously expected to source pig meat only from suppliers that do not use gestation crates by the end of 2022, but has now moved the date to the end of 2024.
But Icahn isn’t accepting that and is ready for a fight over McDonald’s unkept promise of the use of these crates: “We’re not going to fool around with them anymore.”
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