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P&G’s ANIMAL TESTING

Pain for Profit

Although Procter & Gamble (P&G) admit that guinea pigs, rabbits, hamsters, ferrets, rats and mice are among the animals used in their ‘product safety research’ [1], the company is highly secretive about what actually happens to the animals they sacrifice.

However, Uncaged can reveal disturbing examples of P&G’s involvement in painful and lethal animal tests. Apart from pain and injury caused by the chemicals themselves, unfortunately many animals also suffered because of a lack of basic care:

• Over a thousand hamsters, mice and rats forced to inhale tiny, ‘nano-sized’ particles
• Mice genetically-engineered to create new ways of testing ingredients in cosmetic and cleaning products
• Animals injured in hair care and fabric softener skin irritancy tests
• Repeated painful and lethal skin allergy tests on guinea pigs and mice

Earlier P&G tests [2] include:

• an acute toxicity test where dogs were force fed large amounts of a cleaning chemical by stomach tube [3]
• cancer and toxicity tests on rats and mice of optical brighteners and other washing power ingredients
• long-term poisoning tests in animals for colouring agents
• 71 mice were repeatedly force-fed a synthetic musk fragrance by tube [4]

It’s hard to think of anything more vicious than poisoning and killing animals for the sake of tinkering with cosmetics and washing powder formulations. P&G are responsible for relentless cruelty at its most calculating.

FOOTNOTES:

1. ‘Finding Alternatives for Product Safety testing’, P&G publication 2005: ‘85% of the animals used for human safety testing are rats or mice; the remainder are mostly guinea pigs, rabbits, hamsters, and ferrets’. For example, it appears that rabbits are used in the notorious Draize eye irritancy test and developmental toxicity. (The P&G report at www.pg.com./science/Brochure_print.pdf implies that use of the notorious Draize eye test continues.)
2. Details taken from documents submitted to the US Environmental Protection Agency in the early 1990s.
3. Diethylene glycol hexyl ether.
4. Stuard, Caudill, and Lehman-McKeeman (1997). ‘Characterization of the effects of musk ketone on mouse hepatic cytochrome P450 enzymes’. Fundamental & Applied Toxicology 40: 264-271.

The images on this page are typical of the testing carried out by P&G, not actual P&G images.