National Mango Day Delivery From PETA Defends Mice Used in Cruel, Deadly Tests for Mangoes
For Immediate Release:
July 22, 2024
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
To mark National Mango Day today, PETA has sent an empathy kit and letter with a mug featuring a tiny mouse with the message “Mice Are Nice” to Albert Perez, chair of the National Mango Board, to spread the word about PETA’s campaign to compel the government-appointed fruit promotion board to stop requiring that farmers pay assessment fees that go toward funding deadly experiments on animals and to ban all animal tests not specifically required by law.
Experimenters funded by the National Mango Board have tormented and killed at least 160 mice and rats in painful and pointless tests in attempts to make dubious claims about the human health benefits of eating mangoes. These tests include injecting mice with cancer cells, starving them, and force-feeding them and inducing colitis in rats. At the end of the experiments, the animals are killed and dissected.
“Mice are individuals who feel pain and fear and should never be mutilated and killed in any experiments, let alone ones for a common fruit that has long been safely consumed by humans,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA is sending a mug and an empathy kit to the National Mango Board, calling on it to ban experiments on animals and rely instead on human-relevant research to make human health claims.”
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, 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.”
In April, PETA submitted a petition for rulemaking, available in full here, to the U.S. Department of Agriculture calling on the agency to prohibit all agricultural commodity research and promotion boards from using farmers’ mandatory payments to the boards to fund animal testing.
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 the group on X, Facebook, or Instagram.
