The 14th Annual Boycott Procter & Gamble Day

Tomorrow, May 8th, activists around the world will be joining In Defense of Animals and Uncaged to protest the notorious animal testing practices of the world's largest consumer goods organization.

This annual event comes at a time when one of P&G's brands will be instrumental in saving a lot of animals' lives. Dawn dish soap will likely, once again, be the rescuers' choice for cleaning oiled wildlife coming out of the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But one product that's doing a good thing doesn't cancel out the rest of the cruelty going on behind-the-scenes at the company.

In Defense of Animals has been campaigning againt P&G's product testing since 1989. Two decades later, the company continues to perform cruel experiments on animals that are outdated, unnecessary, and not required by law. These include tests where dogs were force fed large amounts of cleaning chemicals and painful, sometimes lethal, skin allergy tests on guinea pigs and mice for a laundry detergent ingredient that has already been proven safe in human trials.

Procter & Gamble uses all kinds of smoke and mirrors to keep the public's attention away from their cruel practices. In 1999, the company made the grand announcement that they would no longer conduct animal tests for current products. It sounds good on paper, until you realize the number of new products created by a mega-corporation like P&G, and how common it is to change ingredients in a product ... both scenarios that kept animal testing fair game, as far as the company was concerned. Also, according to IDA, P&G was exposed for secretly lobbying the European Union to block a ban on cosmetic testing, while planning to work around any new law by moving their animal tests outside of the E.U.

P&G is also famous for making their IAMS/Eukanuba pet food by killing pets. Uncaged exposed horrific experiments carried out on dogs and cats that induced kidney failure, obesity, malnutrition, liver damage, and several other painful conditions in previously healthy animals. In response to the PETA-run Iams Cruelty website, P&G created Iams Against Cruelty, which defensively states "a boycott against a well-tested pet food only penalizes the pet" and "many of the products sold today claiming not to have been tested on animals would not be available if it were not for animal testing." The latter may be true, but that doesn't mean animal testing has to continue now that we know better and there are alternatives. As for the prior statement, while it's important to have a balanced diet, feeding pets isn't rocket science unless you build a pet food around chemicals and preservatives created in a laboratory.

The company also trots out the usual spin that animal testing is only "a last resort," that they're committed to finding non-animal alternatives, and that all they really want is to ensure their products are "safe and effective." But they continue testing ingredients already proven safe, avoiding non-animal alternatives, and ignoring the fact that there are more than 600 companies that manage to produce safe, effective, and cruelty-free products.

Saturday's day of action calls on people to take the message to the streets that animal testing needs to stop. It's a good time to take a look at P&G products and see what could be replaced with cruelty-free alternatives. Since Procter & Gamble is so ubiquitous, Uncaged is focusing the effort with their "Hurful Essences" campaign, encouraging people to start by boycotting Herbal Essences products, which are responsible for the deaths of over a thousand animals and their babies to test a chemical that has been used by humans for decades.

Last, but not least, drop Procter & Gamble a line letting them know that you don't support animal testing and that you're participating in the boycott of their products. For companies the size of P&G, money talks louder than morals.

Photo credit: PETA