Mice Mutilated for Mangoes? PETA Blasts National Board Over Animal Tests

For Immediate Release:
November 1, 2023

Contact:
Kendall Davis 202-483-7382

Just in time for the National Mango Board’s (NMB) 19^th anniversary on Saturday, PETA is blasting the organization with a three-pronged campaign demanding that it ban the torment, mutilation, and killing of animals just to market the health benefits of fruit to consumers. The blitz includes a pair of juicy public ads: A mobile version will traverse the streets outside the NMB’s Orlando headquarters at 3319 Maguire Blvd. today, while a full-page print version will be plastered across Orlando Weekly today and on November 8.

PETA also alerted NMB Chair Albert Perez to the campaign in a letter today urging him to implement a public policy banning the conducting, funding, and commissioning of animal tests, as numerous major food and beverage manufacturers have already done.

“Mutilating mice in laboratories in attempts to make claims about human health and sell fruit is a cocktail of absurdity,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA is calling on the National Mango Board to publicly ban these cruel and ridiculous tests and use superior animal-free science to promote its product.”

Experimenters funded by the NMB have injected mice with cancer cells, starved them, and force-fed them and induced colitis in rats. At the end of the experiments, the animals are killed and dissected. Thousands of animals have been killed in experiments funded by food research and promotion boards, including the U.S. Highbush Blueberry Council, the Mushroom Council, the National Watermelon Promotion Board, the United Sorghum Checkoff Program, and the United Soybean Board.

After hearing from PETA and receiving e-mails from more than 85,000 consumers, the Hass Avocado Board—which once funded experiments in which animals were force-fed, starved, bled, suffocated, and dissected—adopted a public policy stating that it “does not support, fund, or conduct animal research.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, or Instagram.