Victory: Johnson & Johnson Ends Deadly Use of Animals in Sales Rep Training

Following Hours-Long Online PETA Campaign, Company Will No Longer Maim and Kill Animals in Demonstrations for Sales Personnel

For Immediate Release:
October 21, 2016

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

Less than 24 hours after PETA launched an online campaign calling for the cancellation of a deadly sales training exercise conducted by Johnson & Johnson—in which pigs would reportedly be cut open and killed—the company has ended all such use of animals.

In an e-mail sent to PETA last night, the company writes, “Johnson & Johnson as an enterprise—across our medical devices, pharmaceuticals and consumer products businesses—has discontinued live animal use in sales training across our North America region. Further, we are working to discontinue this practice globally by December 31, 2016.”

“PETA welcomes Johnson & Johnson to the modern scientific era,” says PETA Senior Vice President of Laboratory Investigations Kathy Guillermo. “Pigs are wonderful, sensitive beings, not training tools, and there are far better ways for sales reps to learn how medical devices work in human patients.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—first exposed Johnson & Johnson’s use of animals for sales training in 2009. The group conducted protests, held behind-the-scenes negotiations with the company, and introduced a shareholder resolution in 2012 urging it to switch to the superior non-animal methods used by its competitors. These methods—such as advanced human-patient simulators, “living” human-cadaver models, and synthetic soft-tissue models—are widely used throughout the medical products industry.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.