VIDEO: PETA Supporters Call Out Cruel Animal Tests at National Farming Conference

For Immediate Release:
March 13, 2023

Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382

Placard-waving PETA supporters today invaded a presentation by Mac Marshall, a vice president of marketing for the United Soybean Board (USB), during a farming conference held at the Orange County Convention Center.

Supporters continued their demonstration outside after they were escorted from the building, holding signs proclaiming, “United Soybean Board: End Deadly Tests on Animals,” at the corner of International Drive and Convention Way. Video footage is available here.

The USB is one of several agricultural commodity research and promotion boards that receive millions in annual fees paid by American farmers. Some of the money is used for deadly tests on animals to purportedly establish human health claims for marketing soybeans to consumers.

“Animals are subjected to barbaric, lethal experiments just to make dubious human health claims for marketing soybeans,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA is urging the USB to cut wasteful spending on these misguided animal tests and instead use superior, non-animal research methods.”

Some of the USB’s sponsored animal tests include:

• Experimenters repeatedly force-fed a soy ingredient to genetically modified mice prone to diabetes, injected them with cancer cells, starved them for 15 hours, injected them with glucose and insulin, repeatedly took their blood, and then suffocated them to death and dissected them.
• Experimenters fed a soy ingredient or a laxative to genetically modified mice prone to cystic fibrosis, and then killed and dissected them. Before experimenters could kill them, 49 died of the disease.
• Experimenters repeatedly injected a soy ingredient into mice whose ovaries had been cut out, and then suffocated them to death and dissected them.

These tests are neither relevant to humans nor required by law. Soybeans are commonplace foods with a long history of safe human consumption, and tests can easily be done using consenting human volunteers.

After discussions with PETA, the Hass Avocado Board, along with dozens of major food and beverage manufacturers—including General Mills, the Kellogg Company, and Barilla—have all 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, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.