PETA Sways Dole Food Co. to End Years of Funding Animal Tests
Pineapples are no longer the sweetest thing about the Dole Food Company: The world’s largest fruit and vegetable producer recently revealed its compassionate side when it agreed with an appeal from PETA that it should stop funding cruel tests on animals. 🥳
In 1990, Dole helped establish and fund the David Murdock/Dole Food Company Chair of Nutrition at the Mayo Clinic. PETA uncovered that during many of the following years, the clinic’s now former holder of this professorship, K. Sreekumaran Nair, was using animals in gruesome experiments, some of which involved injecting mice with chemicals to induce diabetes, force-feeding them to make them obese, and starving them. He also forced rodents to swim with a weight tied to their tails, electrocuted them, bled them to death, and dissected them.
When we reported this to Dole, it agreed that tormenting, killing, and cutting up animals is a waste of lives and research dollars—and the company contacted the Mayo Clinic to explain its position on animal testing. In response, the clinic arranged to redirect Dole’s funds to another nutrition researcher who uses exclusively animal-free, human-relevant methods.
More than 100 mice and rats were killed in Nair’s experiments published just since 2016, which were not required by law and—because of the vast physiological differences between humans and other animals—produced misleading data that can’t be replicated and are inapplicable to human health.
PETA applauds the Dole Food Company for embracing superior science that doesn’t use animals and sent it a box of mouse-shaped vegan chocolates as a thank-you for taking swift action to help end these grisly experiments.
We’re leading the effort to end crude and lethal animal tests in the global food and beverage industry, having persuaded dozens of major companies such as PepsiCo, the Kellogg Company, and Barilla to ban this horrific practice, which doesn’t advance human nutrition science—and you can help, too. Speak up for animals used by the world’s largest manufacturer of the controversial food flavor enhancer monosodium glutamate (MSG) in sickeningly cruel tests that aren’t even required by law:
