Are You Boycotting Procter & Gamble Yet? Time to Start

When I started becoming more aware of animal issues, there was one mammoth corporation I learned about--and learned to watch out for and avoid--immediately: Procter & Gamble. In the world of unnecessary, cruel testing on animals, P&G is one of the bad guys. And oh, are they everywhere. If you aren't boycotting P&G yet, it's time to start--and when better to start than this Saturday, May 16, the day of global boycott and action called for by Uncaged (UK) and In Defense of Animals?

Please see the boycott lists at Uncaged and at IDA's P&G Kills site for which products to avoid (you can also go straight to P&G's own Web site for their product list). There are dozens of brands and products to cross off your list, all of them very well known. I hope that you're doing your best to purchase only cruelty-free products anyway--products labeled as not tested on animals and products without animal ingredients--but even if you're not all the way there yet, kicking the ubiquitous P&G out of your life can go a long way toward giving those cruel animal-tested products the boot too.

Please order or print out a cruelty-free guide to take with you when you shop (or iPhone users, get the iPhone app I posted about the other day; edit: there's a second option for an iPhone app now too), and also print out these separate P&G lists from IDA and Uncaged--there are too many brands in too many categories to remember, and P&G ventures into product lines (e.g., snack foods) that may not appear in cruelty-free guides (though you should be able to find reference to P&G in the small print of most P&G product packaging too). In the past, I've also had the Logos of Cruelty image up on my fridge as a reminder and quick reference.

And for this year's day of boycott and action, Uncaged and IDA are focusing on P&G brand Herbal Hurtful Essences as an example of what goes on in P&G laboratories. From IDA:

Despite claims from corporate giant Procter & Gamble (P&G) that it tests products on animals only as a last resort and only when required by law, published scientific papers show that P&G took an already approved ingredient in Herbal Essences shampoo - butylparaben - and force-fed it in massive doses to pregnant animals.

Evidence uncovered by the British animal rights group Uncaged shows that P&G force-fed butylparaben - a preservative used for decades in personal care products - to pregnant rats to see if it harms their developing offspring.

The experiment killed 1,300 animals (100 pregnant mothers and their 1,200 newborns) subjecting the mothers to stressful force-feeding for approximately three weeks, after which they were killed in carbon dioxide gas chambers. Experimenters then removed the slowly dying babies from their mothers’ bodies and killed them.

Information on the safety of butylparaben, one of a class of products known as parabens, has already been amply demonstrated at least twenty years earlier. Many of the animals used by P&G for this experiment received massive doses of butylparaben, which, according to the researcher in charge of the study “far exceeds human exposure estimates.”

These tests are not required by any law, and detailed information on this ingredient has been widely available for many years.