Hass Avocado Board Bans Animal Experiments After PETA Push
Landmark Move Spares Animals Suffocation and Starvation Tests
For Immediate Release:
January 28, 2021
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
After PETA and more than 85,000 of its supporters urged the Hass Avocado Board (HAB)—a major agricultural commodity research and promotion board overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)—to end animal testing, it has adopted a groundbreaking new public policy that it will no longer “support, fund, or conduct animal research.”
HAB has sponsored tests in which experimenters force-fed mice a high-fat diet, repeatedly force-fed them a substance found in avocados, starved them for eight hours, injected them with glucose and insulin, repeatedly bled them from their tails, suffocated them, drained their blood, and dissected them.
“PETA thanks the Hass Avocado Board for adopting a history-making new policy that will spare animals abuse in cruel experiments that are irrelevant to human health,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA urges other agricultural commodity check-off boards to use superior, non-animal research, including the U.S. Highbush Blueberry Council, which beheaded animals for tests regarding blueberries.”
In September, PETA wrote to then-USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue to demand an end to the draconian “tax” on farmers who are forced to pay for these cruel tests through annual assessment fees. In October, Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) wrote to him to request a “timeline for phasing out the … use of assessment fees to fund animal testing,” an archaic practice that she noted is “painful and ineffective.”
After discussions with PETA, dozens of major food and beverage manufacturers—including PepsiCo, the Kellogg Company, and Barilla—have established policies against animal testing.
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, click here or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
