Animals Killed to Market Watermelon; PETA and Journalist Maria Celeste Arraras Urge End to Tests
For Immediate Release:
December 10, 2024
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
On PETA’s behalf, Emmy Award-winning journalist María Celeste Arrarás sent a letter today to the National Watermelon Promotion Board, urging the federally-appointed panel to implement a policy banning its funding of experiments on animals.
The action kicks off PETA’s new campaign against the board, accompanying a video slamming the rotten experiments on animals it has funded, none of which are required by law, to make dubious claims about the human health benefits of eating watermelons—a food with a long history of safe consumption. Experiments funded by the watermelon board include injecting mice with cancer cells, both starving and force-feeding them, and inducing colitis in rats. Experimenters then killed the animals, sometimes by breaking their necks, and dissected them.
“No matter how you slice it, injecting mice with diseases to make unreliable marketing claims about eating watermelons is a waste of time, money, and animals’ lives,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA calls on the National Watermelon Promotion Board to ban experiments on animals and instead use human-relevant research.”
After hearing from PETA and receiving e-mails from more than 118,000 consumers, the Hass Avocado Board (HAB) and the National Mango Board (NMB)—both of which once funded experiments in which animals were force-fed, starved, bled, suffocated, and dissected—adopted public policies stating, respectively, that HAB “does not support, fund, or conduct animal research” and that NMB “does not fund research studies involving animals … and has no plans to do so in the future.”
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.
