Victory! Ball Corporation—of Mason Jar Fame—Stops Animal Spinal Injuries

Update: May 4, 2020

Ball Corporation is no longer listed as a platinum partner of Wings for Life, a Red Bull–backed charity that supports horrific and scientifically bogus spinal cord injury experiments on animals, including monkeys, mice, pigs, and rats. Ball’s decision to terminate its association with the charity—which followed discussions with PETA that resulted in Ball’s new public policy that bans funding experiments on animals—represents a strong rebuke of Wings for Life’s support of cruel animal tests.

PETA is calling on Wings for Life to end all funding of these inhumane and archaic animal experiments, which have an abysmal record of failure when it comes to helping humans. We’ve sent the organization a detailed list of promising non-animal research methods that offer patients real hope of treatments, including human tissue engineering with human stem cells, human organoids, and bioprinting.

PETA is also urging other partners of the charity to follow Ball’s lead in supporting only superior, non-animal research that will actually benefit patients. After we contacted the Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior, a current Wings for Life partner, it responded that it supports the charity’s “overall goal” but said that “this does not necessarily mean that [the ministry supports] every research method performed, such as animal testing” and that it has “taken note of the examples of animal testing” that PETA wrote about “and will reassess further funds of starting fees for next year’s Wings for Life Run.”

Originally published on October 1, 2019:

If you’ve ever held a Mason jar, you likely recognize the name of their most famous manufacturer, Ball Corporation. Thanks to PETA, this multibillion-dollar Fortune 500 food and beverage packaging giant will stop funding horrific experiments in which animals are crushed, paralyzed, cut open, drugged, or electrocuted.

While another company now manufactures the world-famous Mason jars under the Ball name, Ball Corporation is still the world’s largest manufacturer of recyclable metal beverage and food containers, supplying packaging for Coke, Pepsi, Budweiser, Coors, and many other brands that are household names. It’s also one of four “Platinum Partners” (the highest partner level) with Wings for Life, a charity organization cofounded by the leader of energy drink maker Red Bull, which funds numerous cruel, deadly, and scientifically unsound spinal cord injury experiments on animals.

Earlier this year, PETA urged Ball to end its support of animal testing in favor of more effective, ethical, and economical, non-animal methods—a protocol that many global food and beverage companies have adopted.

Joined by three leading medical and spinal cord experts, we compiled and shared with Ball mounds of scientific evidence proving that the experiments on animals that the company was helping to fund are abusive and not beneficial to human health. Because of vast physiological differences between species, the only spinal cord injury drug available has been tested on numerous animals and resulted in drastically varying results. Nearly 96% of drugs that test safe and effective in animals end up failing in human clinical trials, wasting precious time and money.

After comparing the solid scientific evidence that we presented with the excuses offered by Wings for Life that failed to justify these experiments, Ball agreed with PETA, and animals won. In a letter, Ball wrote to us:

“Ball Corporation has reviewed your request and will adopt a policy that indicates that the company will not fund, conduct, or commission any tests on animals unless they are explicitly required by law.”

Victory! And that’s not all.

Ball is the first Wings for Life funding partner to distance itself from the organization’s shocking animal experiments. This means that the first major domino has fallen in cutting off funding for those experiments, pushing Wings for Life to adopt more effective, ethical, economical, animal-free research methods.

In tests published since just last year and funded by Ball and others through Wings for Life, experimenters injured and killed more than 4,700 animals. In one of these obscene tests, experimenters inserted electrodes into a monkey’s muscles, forced her to perform stress-inducing tasks, cut open her spine, inserted electrodes into her spinal cord, and electrocuted her nerves before killing her.

In other tests sponsored by Wings for Life, experimenters bred genetically modified mice, repeatedly force-fed them drugs, cut open their spines, crushed and compressed their exposed spinal cords (partially paralyzing them), and only then killed and dissected them. And they dropped weights on pigs’ and rats’ spines to create crushing injuries before all these suffering animals were killed and dissected.

PETA is calling on Wings for Life to end all funding of these inhumane and archaic animal experiments—and urging other partners of the charity to follow Ball’s lead in supporting only superior, non-animal research.

We won, and so did animals. And we’ll keep winning until experiments on animals are history and every laboratory cage is empty. Help keep up the pace of progress by urging Johns Hopkins University to end its invasive, abusive, and useless experiments on barn owls right now: