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BOYCOTT IAMS!!!
For nearly 10 months in 2002 and early 2003, a PETA investigator went undercover at an Iams contract testing laboratory
and discovered a dark and sordid secret beneath the wholesome image of the dog- and cat-food manufacturer: dogs gone crazy
from intense confinement to barren steel cages and cement cells, dogs left piled on a filthy paint-chipped floor after having
chunks of muscle hacked from their thighs; dogs surgically debarked; horribly sick dogs and cats languishing in their cages,
neglected and left to suffer with no veterinary care.
Iams lied to PETA with promises to improve the conditions for
animals in its contract laboratories, even assuring us that enrichment programs were already in place, but our undercover
investigator saw otherwise. She fought for six months to have a single cheap, rubber toy placed in each cold, lonely kennel.
This is Iams’ idea of enrichment.
Our video footage shows Iams representatives touring the facility and witnessing
dogs’ endless circling in barren cells, sweltering in the summer heat. Iams knew the truth yet did nothing to protect
the animals.
The dogs and cats in Iams’ tests are no different from our dogs and cats at home when it comes
to deserving companionship, play, a stimulating environment, and the right not to be tormented in painful experiments.
Luckily,
caring consumers know that advances in nutrition don’t have to come at the expense of animals in labs. Help PETA force
Iams to end these painful and unnecessary tests, as many compassionate companies have already done.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat’s wrong with Iams?
For nearly 10 months, PETA conducted an undercover investigation
in an Iams contract laboratory. What our investigator witnessed and captured on hidden camera would outrage any animal lover:
dogs who had gone crazy from being confined to barren steel-and-cement cells, dogs who had been left on a paint-chipped floor
after having their vocal chords severed and part of their leg muscles hacked out, dogs who were sweltering in scorching heat
and shivering in bitter cold, and horribly sick dogs and cats languishing in their cages, neglected and left to suffer without
veterinary care. The animals in Iams’ tests are no different from our dogs and cats at home when it comes to deserving
companionship, play, a stimulating environment, and the right not to be tormented in painful experiments. But doesn’t Iams have to continue research and development in order
to create better foods and improve the health of dogs? The company can’t stop testing altogether, can it?
We are calling on Iams to rely on non-animal, laboratory
analysis and in-home tests that use dogs and cats who have been volunteered by their human companions. Right now, animals
are suffering endlessly in concrete cells with no exercise or stimulation just so that Iams can slap new claims onto its products
and maintain its market share. It’s all about marketing. If Iams officials cared about the health and happiness of our
companion animals, they would end this unnecessary testing immediately. They’ve proved that all they care about is profit. But what about the fact that Iams’ Web site claims that the company
meets and even exceeds federal regulations?
Iams repeatedly lied to PETA by promising to improve
living conditions for the dogs in its contract labs. Our investigation took place more than a year after Iams promised to
“raise the bar” on animal-welfare standards in its contract facilities and even assured us that enrichment programs
were already in place, but our investigator knew better. At least 27 dogs were killed, and others had illnesses that were
left untreated despite the Iams research policy’s assurances, which specifically state that no animal will ever be deliberately
killed in an Iams test.
Our video footage shows Iams representatives touring the facility and witnessing dogs’
endlessly circling in barren cells in the sweltering heat. Iams officials knew the truth, yet they lied. How can they be trusted
to act in animals’ best interests at this point? Our investigator fought for six months to have a single cheap, rubber
toy placed in each dog’s cell. This is Iams’ idea of “enrichment.” Once animal lovers become aware
that they are financing the confinement and mutilation of animals, they simply won’t buy Iams food or propaganda. What’s going on with the dogs now?
After considerable pressure from PETA, Iams finally
agreed to have the dogs from this particular laboratory removed. We’ve been informed by Iams officials that the dogs
are now in an Iams facility in Dayton, which they have refused to let us see. We have no idea whether the dogs are in a better
situation now than they were before. We are continuing to press Iams to let us see the facility and urging the company to
adopt the dogs out to loving homes, but until we have a confirmation from Iams that this has happened, we will assume otherwise. Why should we believe you and not Iams?
Videotape doesn’t lie. See the abuse for yourself
here. Procter & Gamble, Iams’ parent company, has a long history of cruelty to animals. After years of pressure
to eliminate cruel product testing on animals, the company continues to torture rabbits, ferrets, and many other animals in
its skin- and eye-irritancy experiments for cosmetics. P&G spends more money on advertising in five days than it has spent
on developing alternatives to animal testing in the last 14 years. That’s a bad record for a company that claims to
care about animals. Why are you targeting Iams
specifically? Don’t most major brands test on animals in laboratories?
Iams claims to be a leader in the pet food industry.
We’re asking the company to act like one. As a major food producer, its pioneering choice to end laboratory testing
on animals would serve as an example of progress in the industry and would begin a truly “new and improved” era
in pet food, not just a minor change at the animals’ expense.
For a list of forward-thinking companion-animal
food companies that have stopped or never conducted tests on animals in laboratories click here. Aren’t
you against all animal testing, even for human medical research?
Animal testing has never been a necessary, safe, or
effective way to conduct medical research. Iams tests are particularly outrageous because animals in these tests are confined
to barren steel-and-cement cells and forced to undergo invasive surgery just to test dog and cat food.
Animal lovers
wouldn’t sacrifice their own animal companions’ welfare to benefit other animals, and they don’t want to
subject animals just like theirs to cruel and unnecessary experimentation. We’re talking about dog and cat food here.
The truth is that this continued experimentation is about nothing more than Iams’ pocketbook.
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Quick Facts
- Ranch-raised foxes are kept in cages only 2.5 feet square (minks in cages 1-foot-by-3-feet), with up to four animals per
cage.
 Animals can languish in traps for days. Up to 1 out of every 4 trapped animals escapes by chewing off his or her own feet,
only to die later from blood loss, fever, gangrene, or predation.
- Every year, thousands of dogs, cats, raptors, and other so-called "trash" animals (including endangered species like the
bald eagle) are crippled or killed by traps.
 To kill the animals without damaging their fur, trappers usually strangle, beat, or stomp them to death. Animals on fur farms
may be gassed, electrocuted, poisoned with strychnine, or have their necks snapped. These methods are not 100 percent effective
and some animals "wake up" while being skinned.
 According to a study by Ford Motor Company engineer Gregory H. Smith, it takes almost three times as much energy to make a
coat from trapped animals' pelts—and 40 times as much from ranch-raised furs—than it does to make a fake fur coat.
In the U.S., most people believe that this is a battle we won years ago. They are
wrong, and their mistaken belief that no one kills animals in order to produce a new cosmetic or toiletry item means that
they have stopped using their consumer dollars to protest this most despicable animal abuse. If we are to achieve the goal
of the EU (and Witherspoon’s character)—an end to the use of animals in product testing—this must change.
I understand where this myth of total success came from. I led People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’
campaign against product testing on animals from 1989 to 1993. They were heady years, when the giants of the cosmetics industry
fell like great oaks, one by one, crashing down amid undercover investigations documenting horrendous suffering in the testing
laboratories. Videotape footage of a kitten convulsing after being doused with a chemical, a rabbit whose tender skin had
been eaten away by a corrosive substance, rats in death throes after huge amounts of soaps were pumped into their stomachs,
a beagle cowering alone in her box-like cage. These images blackened the eye of the consumer-product industry and sparked
massive change.
First Benetton cosmetics, after weighing the benefits and drawbacks of its animal tests, came to PETA
and announced a permanent ban on all use of animals. Then came Avon, Revlon, and Estée Lauder, in rapid-fire succession. When
I began my job, PETA listed fewer than 50 companies that refused to test on animals, most of them small, mail-order manufacturers
that were the ethical leaders of the industry.
Within three years, that list had grown to several hundred companies.
For the first time since the animal tests were developed in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, consumers could go into
any department, grocery, or drugstore and buy mainstream brands from companies that did not harm and kill animals.
On
the scientific side, many non-animal tests were developed. Instead of measuring how long it took a chemical to burn away the
cornea of a rabbit’s eye, manufacturers could now drop that chemical onto donated human corneas. Human skin cultures
could be grown and ordered for irritancy testing. These and dozens more tests now in use today are cheaper, faster, and more
accurate at predicting human reactions to a product than the old animal tests ever were.
Despite these amazing successes, which translate into less suffering and death
for animals, there are holdouts in the consumer-product industry. They are huge multiproduct manufacturers, including Unilever,
Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, and others, driven by fear of lawsuits (though animal tests have not proved effective
in a company’s defense when a consumer sues) and, inexplicably, inertia. Their reluctance to change in the face of consumer
demand and superior non-animal test methods is difficult to understand, but one company CEO once told me that companies that
continue to blind and poison animals do so simply because they have always done so and don’t have the vision to try
a new and better way. “And,” he added, “they don’t want to prove PETA right.”
Who would
want to buy and use the products of a company whose executives are more interested in “winning” against a consumer
campaign than in sparing animals miserable, caged lives and agonizing deaths?
The European Union recently voted to
phase out all product testing on animals, but the U.S. government is not following its example. The best way to stop companies
from using animals is to refuse to purchase their products and to write and tell them why you won’t be applying their
eye shadow, cleaning your clothes with their detergent, or washing your child’s hair with their shampoo. Now, as in
1989, the power is in the hands of the consumers.
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Get free stickers at peta2.com
Why KFC?
PETA is asking KFC to eliminate the worst abuses that chickens suffer
on the factory farms and in the slaughterhouses of its suppliers, including live scalding, life-long crippling, and painful
debeaking. Click here to learn more about PETA’s demands.
Chickens are inquisitive
and interesting animals who are thought to be as intelligent as cats, dogs, and even primates. When in their natural surroundings,
rather than on factory farms, they form friendships and social hierarchies, recognize one another, care for their young, and
enjoy a full life of dustbathing, making nests, roosting in trees, and more.
The more than 850 million chickens raised
each year for KFC’s restaurants aren’t able to do any of these things. They are crammed by the tens of thousands
into sheds that stink of ammonia fumes from accumulated waste and given barely enough room to move (each bird lives in a space
about the size of a sheet of paper). They routinely suffer broken bones from being bred to be top-heavy, being subjected to
callous handling (workers roughly grab birds by their legs and stuff them into crates), and being shackled upside-down at
slaughterhouses. Chickens are often still fully conscious when their throats are cut and when they are dumped into tanks of
scalding-hot water to remove their feathers. When they’re killed, chickens are still babies, not yet 2 months old out
of a natural life span of more than 10 years.
In May 2001, KFC’s parent company, Yum! Brands, assured PETA that
it intended to “raise the bar” on animal welfare, but to date, KFC has done nothing to address the most egregious
animal cruelty in the chicken industry. We need your help to convince KFC to take some key steps to reduce the worst suffering.
Click here for a brief history of PETA's campaign against KFC.
What KFC Needs to Improve
Chickens are probably the most abused animals on the face of the planet—they are treated in ways that would warrant
felony cruelty-to-animals charges were they dogs, cats, or even cows or pigs. Because federal laws exempt chickens from the
Animal Welfare and Humane Slaughter acts, sadistic and routine cruelty go unpunished, and it is up to companies like KFC to
ensure that the chickens who end up in their buckets and boxes are not grossly abused. KFC has ignored this responsibility
almost entirely, and its suppliers continue to abuse chickens—who are remarkable animals with distinct personalities,
social orders, systems of communication, and intelligence as advanced as that of many other animals—in ways that would
be illegal if dogs and cats were the victims.
KFC’s breeding birds have their sensitive beaks seared off with hot blades soon after they are born. "Broilers,"
or chickens raised for their flesh, are bred and drugged in order to make them gain weight quickly, which often causes their
hearts and lungs to fail and their legs to become crippled under their own heavy bodies. Archaic slaughter methods and faulty
machinery, combined with an absence of laws to protect chickens, cause millions of them to be scalded alive in feather-removal
tanks or have their throats slit while they are still conscious.
PETA’s recommended animal welfare program was developed by members of KFC’s own animal welfare board and sent to KFC’s chief operating officer on March
11, 2005. KFC has yet to adopt any of the recommendations. Several members of KFC's animal welfare panel have resigned, after
having been used by the company as a shield for years, during which time none of their (and PETA's) recommendations were adopted
The following is a basic outline of PETA's recommended animal welfare program for KFC:
• Adopt the “Animal Care Standards” program. This program creates guidelines to protect
chickens on factory farms and covers issues such as ammonia concentration, lighting conditions, and living space in chicken
sheds. It also prohibits intentional starvation of breeding birds and states that birds must be provided with mental and physical
stimulation.
• Replace electrical stunning and throat-slitting with controlled-atmosphere killing.
Experts agree that controlled-atmosphere killing causes much less suffering than KFC’s present method of snapping chickens’
legs into metal shackles and slitting their throats, often while they are still conscious.
• Switch
to less cruel mechanized chicken gathering. Studies have shown that using manual methods results in four times as
many broken legs, more than eight times as much bruising, and increased stress on the chickens.
• Breed
for health rather than forcing rapid growth, and stop feeding drugs to chickens. Breed leaner, healthier, less aggressive
birds instead of breeding the biggest, fattest birds possible, and stop feeding chickens antibiotics and other drugs for nontherapeutic
purposes.
• Make all welfare standards transparent and verifiable. Any meaningful animal welfare
program must be verified by announced and unannounced independent third-party audits, the guidelines for and results of which
must be made available to the public through KFC’s Web site.
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