Victory! Kellogg Company Ends Deadly Animal Tests After 65 Years
Following extensive discussions with PETA US that spanned more than 11 years, the Kellogg Company, which trades as Kellogg’s in the UK, has introduced a new global policy that prohibits conducting, funding, supporting, and condoning experiments on animals.
The world’s leading cereal maker, Kellogg has adopted a new global policy ending the use of animals in harmful and deadly experiments for establishing health claims for marketing food products or ingredients when not explicitly required by law – a practice that the company pursued for nearly 65 years.
PETA US first urged Kellogg to stop conducting and funding experiments on animals in 2007. In the following years, the company pledged to minimise and limit the scope of its tests on animals, required audits of all the testing laboratories it used, and eliminated animal tests in its own laboratories.
Its new global policy, recently finalised, prohibits conducting, funding, supporting, and condoning animal tests.
From 1995 to 2016, Kellogg conducted, funded, or supplied materials for deadly experiments that used a total of 1,213 rats and 60 hamsters. Its tests on animals date back to at least 1954, but after reaching an agreement with PETA US, the company posted its new public policy prohibiting animal testing in January 2019.
In one of Kellogg’s tests, experimenters starved rats for two days, removed half of their small intestine, fed them fatty acids, force-fed or injected them with drugs, and then killed and dissected them. In another, experimenters fed rats a high-fat diet with wheat bran, repeatedly injected them with a carcinogen that induces colon tumours, suffocated them, and dissected them. None of these experiments to substantiate product-marketing claims is required by law.
What You Can Do
Non-animal methods are often faster and more accurate than animal experiments. And where bans on animal testing have been implemented, we’ve seen a boom in the development of superior, non-animal tests. To this end, national governments must invest more in animal-friendly strategies and the EU must halt all tests on animals whilst legislators review the law designed to protect the animals used. You can call for them to do just that:
