VICTORY: YAKULT ENDS ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS AFTER PETA US APPEAL

For Immediate Release:
6 February 2018

Company Agrees to Stop Force-Feeding, Poisoning, and Killing Rodents in Cruel Tests

Sydney – Just weeks after PETA US urged Yakult Honsha Co., Ltd., to stop force-feeding, poisoning, and killing rodents in order to make various questionable health claims about its products, the Tokyo-based food and beverage giant, which sells probiotics and other products all over the world, has pledged to end all its experiments on animals and conduct only non-animal studies going forward.

In a letter to the company, PETA US noted that since all the tests involved common food ingredients with no toxicity concerns, the studies could have safely used human volunteers – and in fact, numerous such studies have already been conducted and published.

“Yakult Honsha did the right thing by ending cruel animal tests, which are irrelevant to human health and not required by law,” says PETA spokesperson Emily Rice. “PETA is calling on other companies that still experiment on animals to follow suit and embrace modern, humane, animal-free research methods instead.”

PETA notes that experiments conducted by the company included subjecting mice to whole-body radiation, injecting them with chemicals, force-feeding them probiotics or bacteria to induce lethal infections, and feeding them apple pomace extract before forcing them to run on a treadmill until exhausted. At the end of the experiments, the animals were killed and dissected.

Yakult Honsha joins a growing list of companies – including Barilla, The Coca-Cola Company, Lipton, and Ocean Spray – that have worked with PETA or its international affiliates to end animal tests.

For more information about animal experimentation, please visit PETA.org.au.

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