PETA Allies to Be Blindfolded at Ajinomoto Shareholder Meeting
For Immediate Release:
June 22, 2022
Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382
“When will Ajinomoto follow the global trend and ban all animal tests that are not explicitly required by law?” If selected to attend the company’s annual meeting tomorrow, that’s the question PETA Asia’s Laila Imai—acting as a shareholder representative—would have asked executives of conglomerate Ajinomoto Co. Inc., the multinational owner of Hondashi, Consommé, and Knorr. But PETA wasn’t among the shareholders chosen so as shareholders and board members enter the building, a group of PETA Asia members will be waiting, blindfolded and holding signs that read, “Ajinomoto: Don’t Be Blind to Animal Cruelty.”
When: Thursday, June 23, 9:00 a.m.–10:00 p.m.
Where: Ajinomoto Group Takanawa Training Center, 3-13-65 Takanawa, Minato-ku, Tokyo
The stock in Ajinomoto was purchased in 2020 to urge shareholders to end the company’s experiments on animals. PETA has uncovered that since the 1950s, Ajinomoto experimenters have cut open dogs’ stomachs, inserted tubes into them, starved the animals, fed them MSG, taken their stomach fluid, and injected them with drugs, purportedly to establish health claims for marketing the company’s food products and ingredients. Some of Ajinomoto’s other tests have involved inserting tubes into day-old piglets’ arteries and starving them, electroshocking rats, and compelling mice to fight each other. These tests are neither relevant to human health nor required by law.
“It’s indefensible to torment animals in painful and invasive experiments, all to market food and beverages to humans,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA is calling on Ajinomoto to join dozens of other global food giants that have ended animal tests and switch to effective, ethical, economical, non-animal research.”
As PETA notes in the question, Ajinomoto’s newly released animal-testing policy allows for the continuation of nearly all the same tests that it’s been conducting and funding for decades. The company is violating its own “3R” policy to replace, reduce, and refine the use of animals in experiments by continuing to greenlight these tests while animal-free research methods for these purposes are readily available.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
