PETA Critical Of Iams After Company’S Testing Announcement

Female Beagles in Tests Still Scheduled to Die, Many More Problems, Says Group

For Immediate Release:
8 October 2004

Contact:
Yvonne Taylor 020 7357 9229 ext 405
Dawn Carr 020 7357 9229 ext 224

Dayton, USA – PETA’s campaign to end Iams’ use of animals in painful pet-food laboratory experiments has succeeded in moving the company forward one important step but not nearly enough to meet PETA’s demands. Iams yesterday announced, three days before a PETA formal resolution is to be presented at the company’s annual meeting in the US, that it will stop using university and private contract laboratories for its pet-food tests and transfer tests to its own Dayton facility within two years, as well as stepping up the use of home testing and testing in animal shelters and other nonlaboratory settings.

“It’s a step in the right direction but a small, slow one,” says PETA Europe Director Dawn Carr. “The bottom line is that no one who cares about dogs and cats should buy Iams food while the company still allows any animal to suffer in tests that it is not legally required to conduct in the first place.” 

Credibility is another factor. As early as in 1999, Iams announced that it would no longer kill animals at the end of studies, and yet it is believed that a current Iams study protocol at Auburn University in the US calls for 80 to 120 geriatric beagles to be impregnated and then killed after their puppies are weaned. Many of the litters have already been born and some are even past the point of weaning, so it is quite possible that these beagles are already dead.

PETA has no intention of calling off its campaign against Iams in spite of the company’s announcement and is still deeply concerned that Iams is doing the following: 

§         Replacing dogs and cats with other animals as it has at Purdue University in the US, where it has just given $195,140 to study muscle atrophy in mice until June 2006. Muscle atrophy in rodents is created by suspending the animals by their tails for weeks or months at a time. Purdue is currently conducting kidney-failure experiments on dogs for Iams that will continue until July 2005.

§         Expanding its own Dayton facility, meaning that it has no intention of giving up all experiments on dogs and cats. It should stop building and, instead, devote those resources to figuring out how to eliminate all pet-food tests.

§         Continuing to fund chair positions at universities where nutritional testing is conducted. Often, the experiments in physiology and other departments at universities are worse than those that Iams conducted prior to being bought by P&G, resulting in the mutilation and deaths of dogs and cats used in bone-formation experiments and other equally cruel, painful tests.

§         Refusing to allow PETA to tour its retirement locations. There is nothing proprietary about such facilities.

For more about PETA’s Iams campaign, visit IamsCruelty.com.

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