In league with the devil?! P&G REDUCES ANIMAL USE 53% IN 10 YEARS–– WHILE TRIPLING IN SIZE––YET HEARS LITTLE PRAISE
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1995:
CINCINNATI––Say anything good about Procter &
Gamble and you’ll be accused of dancing with the devil. Take it
from the anonymously printed and distributed flyer ANIMAL PEO-
PLEreceived while researching this article:
“The President of Procter & Gamble appeared on the Phil
Donahue Show on March 1, 1995. He announced that due to the
openness of our society, he was coming out of the closet about his
association with the Church of Satan. He stated that a large portion
of the profits from Procter & Gamble products go to support this
satanic church. When asked by Donahue if stating this on television
would hurt his business, he replied, ‘There are not enough
Christians in the U.S. to make a difference.’”
No such thing ever happened. The story is essentially the
same one purportedly circulated by Amway distributors James and
Linda Newton, of Parsons, Kansas, in 1990. P&G sued them for
their trouble. But it didn’t start with the Newtons, nor was P&G the
original target. According to Arthur Lyons, in his 1988 debunking
volume Satan Wants You: The Cult of Devil Worship in America,
“In 1977 the rumor was widely circulated in fundamentalist circles
that the secret of McDonald’s success was that the chain donated a
portion of its profits each year to the Church of Satan. Corroboration
of the Satanic tithing allegedly came from no less a personage than
McDonald’s owner, Ray Kroc, who was reputed to have admitted
to the diabolic connection while appearing on the Phil Donahue
show. In fact, Kroc had been a guest on the Donahue show in May
of 1977, but his most startling admission had been his intention to
introduce the McDonald’s Filet o’ Fish in Cincinnati.”
Continued Lyons, “The idea of a Satanic pact, trading
one’s soul for earthly wealth, is an ancient one, and it cropped up
again in 1980 when rumors surfaced that the Procter & Gamble
moon-and-stars trademark was in reality a Satanic symbol, and that
the company was run by Satanists. The story went that the
owners of Procter & Gamble long ago made a pact with the
Devil that assured the company’s success in exchange for
putting Satan’s logo on all its products. ‘Proof’ cited for this
ridiculous claim was that a company executive had revealed
the demonic truth on Donahue or 60 Minutes, depending on
the version. It mattered little that Donahue and spokesmen for
60 Minutes denied any such interview ever took place.
Neighbors told neighbors that they talked to someone who
saw the show, or heard it from someone who heard it from
someone, etc. By mid-1982, P&G’s consumer services
department was getting 15,000 calls a month from people
wanting to know about the company’s Satanic connections.
Eventually, a counter-publicity campaign was launched, but
in the end, the company wound up changing its logo.”
Apparently even this wasn’t enough to exorcise the gossip,
especially after P&G returned to some use of the old logo in a
revival of popular traditional packaging designs.
Is this man Satan?
The most diabolical figure P&G had any dealings
with during 1980-1982, at least in the minds of many defend-
ers of animal testing at the time, was Henry Spira of Animal
Rights International, the Coalition Against the LD50, and the
Coalition For Non-Violent Food. Conspiracy theorists will
note that Spira has also dickered with McDonald’s, getting
the restaurant chain to ask that meat suppliers honor a code of
humane practices. (ANIMAL PEOPLE, cover, April
1994.) And Spira will be the first to acknowledge that he
sometimes looks and feels like the devil after working around
the clock on projects to help animals––though others think he
looks more like the late vegan mystic Sadu Vaswani, who
taught kindness to animals as a first precept of holiness. But
while no one has ever reported seeing Spira with a halo, he
long since became viewed as an angel in disguise by corporate
executives, for frequently finding ways for them to reduce
animal suffering without losing shares of competitive markets.
It was Spira’s record involving P&G that made his
reputation––because he not only drove a hard bargain, as in
previous cases, but also kept it at personal cost. After con-
vincing the American Museum of Natural History to give up
performing bizarre sexual experiments on cats in 1976, and
securing a pledge from Revlon to phase out animal testing in
1980, Spira noted that P&G had already begun replacing the
classical Draize and LD50 with tests using fewer animals,
and decided to encourage P&G––one of the largest makers of
personal care products in the world––to adopt as corporate
goals a reduction in animal use, the ongoing refinement of
tests to use fewer animals in less painful tests, and outright
replacement of animal tests wherever possible. If P&G took
the lead, Spira reasoned, the entire personal care industry
would have to come along. P&G could set a new standard,
sparing millions of animal lives every year.
Favoring negotiation over confrontation, Spira was
again successful. On May 11, 1983, P&G vice president
William Dobson sent Spira a detailed four-page outline of
P&G’s achievements, prospects, and pledges toward
advancing the “Three Rs.” “Our company is committed,”
Dobson wrote, “to further reduce the use of animals in our
safety testing programs.”
“It’s both visionary and practical,” responded
Spira, after five days of review. “We hope and expect that
others will follow.”
Since that exchange, P&G has developed alterna-
tives and phased out animal testing faster than any major cor-
porate rival. Yet animal rights groups including In Defense
of Animals, the Doris Day Animal League, People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Humane Society of the
U.S. have all meanwhile mounted increasingly vituperous
anti-P&G campaigns, including boycotts. The campaigns
began almost as soon as Spira announced P&G had agreed to
try to eventually phase out all non-pharmaceutical animal
testing––a goal which at the present rate of progress could be
achieved within another decade. When that happens, every-
one wants to claim credit for a piece of the “victory.”
Time and again, Spira has urged that the outrage be
redirected toward firms which have yet to commit themselves
to the “Three Rs,” much less make substantive progress. In
1987, Spira even flew to Cincinnati to speak in defense of
P&G. Militants have bitterly attacked him ever since for
“selling out,” though for what is unclear: he pays himself
just $19,800 a year after a recent raise, lives in the same rent-
controlled New York apartment he has occupied for more
than 20 years, and has rarely been seen spending a dime on
himself.
The militants haven’t listened, but corporate
America has. “When Henry Spira knocks, executives know
enough to listen,” Simon Billenness of the conscientious
investing advisory firm Franklin Research observed during
the McDonald’s negotiations. Frankie Trull, executive direc-
tor of the Foundation for Biomedical Research, offers similar
testimony, as do Bernard Rollin of Colorado State
University, Adele Douglass of the American Humane
Association, and Andrew Rowan of the Tufts University
Center for Animals and Public Policy, all of whom have
worked closely with Spira in negotiating various sensitive
agreements to further humane concerns.
Results, however, tell more than love-letters.
Results
“P&G’s program to systematically reduce animal
use began in 1984,” confirms P&G corporate communica-
tions officer Deborah White. “We use this year as our base-
line reference for measuring our progress in reducing animal
use. However, it’s important to recognize how different
P&G is today from 1984 in terms of size, sales volume, the
number and diverse nature of our product lines, and the
explosive growth of our non-U.S. business,” which at $15
billion a year now equals U.S. sales. “Based on sales,”
White continues, “P&G has tripled in growth since 1984.
We’ve virtually doubled our worldwide volume––95%
growth. We are now ranked 12th in size among U.S. firms,
and 34th in the world. None of the companies routinely men-
tioned as examples of corporations which do not conduct ani-
mal testing even come close to P&G in terms of the size and
diversity of their business.”
In fact, P&G is bigger than all self-proclaimed cru-
elty-free companies in the world combined.
Sound like an apologia for failure?
Don’t bet on it. Cross-comparison of USDA docu-
ments with information supplied by White establishes that in
1984 P&G used 74,991 animals in testing: 61,590 mice and
rats, plus 13,401 animals of the species tracked under the
Animal Welfare Act: dogs, cats, guinea pigs, hamsters,
rabbits, and non-human primates. In 1994, P&G used
35,246 animals: 30,664 mice and rats, plus 4,582 animals of
AWA-tracked species, including 494 dogs; 1,817 guinea
pigs; 872 hamsters; 571 rabbits; 538 ferrets; 163 mini-pigs;
and 30 full-sized pigs. P&G used no cats at all in 1994, no
non-human primates, and no animals of any other species.
“Our annual internal accounting of animal use
includes all pharmaceutical, health care, and consumer prod-
uct safety research conducted at P&G in-house facilities, plus
studies conducted on P&G’s behalf at universities and con-
tract laboratories anywhere in the world,” White states. “We
no longer operate any in-house animal research facilities out-
side of the U.S., since closing two such facilities in France
and Japan that we acquired when P&G bought other firms.”
Overall, P&G has reduced animal use 56%.
The easy tests to replace were replaced long ago.
“Since 1986,” White affirms, “the majority of P&G’s animal
use each year has been for pharmaceutical and health care
safety and development research. In both 1986 and 1987,
health care research accounted for 70% of P&G’s total use.
Since 1988, these percentages have ranged from 83% to 90%
of total use. P&G’s animal use for all research related to non-
drug consumer product safety has decreased 90% from our
use in 1984, despite major acquisitions and growth of our
business globally. For example, within the past seven years
our animal use in non-drug consumer product safety related
research decreased more than 50% while the number of major
safety clearances for new products in the beauty/personal care
product and laundry areas increased by 45%.”
After health care research, P&G’s biggest area of
animal use is, ironically, in validating newly developed
alternative tests to the satisfaction of regulators. This
accounted for 52% of the animals used in non-drug consumer
product safety testing during 1994.
“Whatever the actual numbers,” comments PhD
and DVM Stephen Dubin of the Biomedical Engineering and
Science Institute at Drexel University in Philadelphia, “it
should be noted that P&G sponsors a major funding program
to find alternatives to animal testing,” not only internally but
also externally, via the International Program for Animal
Alternatives. “Several other companies have given support to
such research in established research centers, such as the
Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing,”
Dubin acknowledges, “for which God may richly bless
them, but to my knowledge it is only P&G that has sent out
notices, received proposals, and funded the projects as a
company.”
Says White, “We spent $7.6 million last year on
these efforts, and have spent over $38 million to develop
alternatives to animal use since 1984,” an average of $3.8
million annually. The spending has been almost equally
divided between the internal and external programs, produc-
ing some confusion on the part of reporters who have mistak-
en the $19 million spent inside and the $19 million spent out-
side for one and the same figure.
Vested interests
So why isn’t progress coming faster? Activists
accuse P&G and other firms, including others funding J.H.
CAAT, as the Johns Hopkins center is known, of pussyfoot-
ing around the testing issue rather than moving forcefully
toward change.
“Industry has a vested interest in successful alterna-
tives development,” responds communication specialist
Deborah Rudacille of J.H. CAAT, “because in vitro tests for
product development and safety testing are quicker, cheaper,
and more popular with consumers than animal tests.”
However, Rudacille continues, “Companies which are small
and manufacture a limited range of products, composed of
ingredients which are known to be safe based upon past ani-
mal testing or years of human use, can more easily make the
leap to testing protocols which eliminate the use of animals.
Larger companies, which create ingredients as well as prod-
ucts, are in a more difficult position, because they must
prove to government regulators that newly developed ingredi-
ents and combinations of ingredients are safe.”
The sheer size of P&G is probably the biggest buga-
boo. “We market more than 300 brands of consumer products
and pharmaceuticals in over 140 countries,” White explains.
“We must comply with all the regulations governing the safe-
ty and efficacy of our products and ingredients in the coun-
tries where we do business. Many regulatory agencies, for
example in Europe and Japan, have mandatory animal testing
requirements for approval of new ingredients and/or prod-
ucts,” which P&G introduces often for reasons “ranging from
better product performance to improved environmental com-
patibility. Unfortunately, “ White continues, “many regula-
tions are not consistent between different countries or even
among regulatory agencies within the same country.”
“At the present time,” Rudacille confirms, “regula-
tory agencies in the U.S. and abroad do not accept alternative
tests as replacements for whole animal tests. However,” she
adds hopefully, “the European Union has scheduled a phase-
out and eventual ban of animal use for testing cosmetic prod-
ucts beginning January 1, 1998, provided that scientifically
validated alternatives are available. The impact of the EU leg-
islation on U.S. regulatory procedures and industrial practice
remains in question.”
Adds Tony Youdale, who recently retired from the
presidency of the Joseph F. Morgan Research Foundation, a
Canadian organization that funds the development of alterna-
tives to animal testing, “The principal source of funding in
the search for alternatives is the large corporations who pro-
duce consumer products. They are mostly behind this project.
They are, however, along with the scientific community,
completely alienated by the animal rights movement. I spent
most of my time,” as Morgan Foundation president, “proving
to corporations and scientists that we were not in any way
connected to animal rights. This resulted in slowing down our
projects and wasting money that could have been used to
advance alternatives research.”
Still, Youdale believes, “The worldwide movement
toward finding alternatives is moving ahead. The First World
Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences was held
in Baltimore just over a year ago,” with substantial financial and scien-
tific support from P&G, “and attracted 800 delegates from 27 coun-
tries. It was a great success and put research on alternatives on the road
to becoming a science in and of itself.” A follow-up conference is
scheduled for 1996, again with P&G backing.
However, the First World Congress “was picketed by animal
rights activists,” Youdale notes with disgust, “because, in their
words, ‘vivisectors attended.’ Believe me, this is not the way to attain
the end we all desire. The blame for continued use of animal testing
must be put in the right place,” Youdale emphasizes. “Every govern-
ment around the world has a regulating body which decides on the stan-
dard which must be met for the sale of products in that country.
Companies must meet these standards, and will test to the worst-case
scenario so that they comply.”
The real foot-dragging, Youdale charges, is at the bureau-
cratic level: administrators are reluctant to change familiar procedures
from fear of being bashed by politicians who in turn fear being bashed
by constituents for allegedly “relaxing” standards. “For example,” says
Youdale, “Procter & Gamble has developed in their own laboratories a
Low Volume Eye Test which would replace the Draize. It sets different
criteria for measurement and reduces the stress on the animals. Procter
& Gamble considers it acceptable safety-wise, and are prepared to mar-
ket this test. Government regulatory bodies of some major trading mar-
kets, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration at last count,
refuse to endorse this method, and so Procter & Gamble must continue
to use the old methods.”
The FDA is under the guns of both an anti-regulatory
Congress, antagonistic toward imposing any new regulations even
when they enable scrapping old regulations, and a wary coalition of
environmentalists and consumer advocates, who seek to keep regula-
tions from being gutted by trying to obstruct any amendments whatever.
Typical is the ongoing battle over amending the 1958 Delany clause,
which currently bars the presence of any trace of carcinogens in
processed food. Scientific advances now permit detecting carcinogens
in amounts miniscule relative to the threshhold for harm––but attempts
to replace the Delaney clause with a “negligible risk” standard, includ-
ing a bill introduced on May 4 of this year by Pat Roberts (R-Kansas)
and Tom Biley (R-Virginia), have always met vitriolic opposition..
P&G has tried to do something about the political obstacles.
“For example,” explains White, “we sponsored the first symposium on
this issue for the American Veterinary Medical Association. Along
with several leaders in the animal protection community,” notably
Douglass of the AHA, “we actively supported inclusion of language in
the 1993 National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act promoting the
need for federal leadership in alternatives research and establishing cri-
teria for regulatory acceptance of new methods. We were the only com-
pany who actually testified before the U.S. Congress on behalf of this
portion of the bill. As a result of this legislation, the government has
organized an interagency committee to determine a much needed
process for regulatory acceptance of new alternative methods in toxicol-
ogy testing.”
P&G scientists and others sponsored by P&G have virtually
“written the book” on non-animal toxicology research: more than 400
papers published in peer-reviewed journals since 1984. Last year was
comparatively slow, with just over 30 published papers on alternatives
coming out of the P&G labs––but that was still a major share of all the
papers on alternatives published worldwide.
The beating goes on
While P&G was doing all that, In Defense of Animals
relaunched its anti-P&G campaign last fall. The literature mailed to
IDA members and membership prospects and posted on computer bul-
letin boards looked eerily familiar, warning that P&G was about to
launch a $17.5 million assault on the animal rights movement. There
was a reason it looked familiar, IDA president Elliot Katz admitted to
ANIMAL PEOPLE: it was an overrun of literature previously mailed
in 1989. “Someone found it in storage and we decided to use it rather
than let it go to waste,” Katz said.
Similar material was circulated on DDAL stationery.
But there was only slightly more truth to the story of the
$17.5 million anti-animal rights campaign, even in 1989, than there is
to the story of Satanic influence. It is true that in 1989, ired by the
ongoing attacks, then-P&G president John Smale proposed such a
campaign to the P&G board of directors. His strategic outline was
immediately leaked, however, by cooler heads at the upper echelons of
the company. Spira received and circulated a copy. So did the Editor
of ANIMAL PEOPLE. So did the Cincinnati Inquirer. The proposal
was scrapped. Smale was replaced as chairman within less than a year.
When the U.S. Surgical Corporation formed the Americans for Medical
Progress Educational Foundation in 1991, apparently following the
same general outline, P&G executive Linda Ulrey called the Editor of
ANIMAL PEOPLE within minutes of getting a copy of the announce-
ment via fax to make emphatically plain that P&G neither had anything
whatever to do with AMPEF nor wanted anything to do with it.
No large institution with a long history, hundreds of facilities,
and thousands of employees escapes questionable episodes, and P&G
has been involved in some. During the tenure of Smale’s successor,
Edwin Artzt, the Franklin Research & Development Corporation
newsletter Franklin’s Insight reported in 1992, P&G “at times exhibit-
ed an almost obsessive concern for secrecy. Perhaps the best example
of this occurred when a Wall Street Journal reporter [Alice Sweasy]
wrote a story containing information on P&G which was believed to
have been leaked by an employee. In an unsuccessful attempt to find
the leak, local police used an obscure Ohio law to subpoena the records
of over 800,000 phone lines.”
While Artzt admitted that P&G had “made an error in judge-
ment” in that case, he also claimed the investigation was conducted “in
good faith and responsibly,” whatever that may mean.
At about the same time, P&G cancelled $1 million worth of
advertising scheduled to have aired on WHDH-TV in Boston because
the station broadcast two 30-second ads from the San Francisco-based
social action group Neighbor to Neighbor. The ads urged a boycott of
Folger’s coffee, a P&G subsidiary, to force P&G to pressure the gov-
ernment of El Salvador to disband death squads and negotiate an end to
decades of civil war. After a peace accord was reached in El Salvador
in January 1992, Neighbor to Neighbor lifted the Folger’s boycott.
Later in 1992, P&G fired forklift driver Tina Geronimi, one
of four employees who cosponsored an anti-animal testing sharehold-
er’s resolution that year, for allegedly over-reporting her working
hours. She claimed retaliation; but the other three cosponsors remain
with P&G.
The McGuire case
Perhaps the messiest situation involving P&G, ever, con-
cerns the Buckeye Cellulose pulp mill on the Fenholloway River in
northern Florida. In 1947, trying to attract the mill, Florida designated
the then-unpolluted Fenholloway an “industrial river,” meaning the
mill, built in 1954, could use it as an open sewer. By 1990 the
Environmental Protection Agency had documented severe chemical
pollution in the Fenholloway, with apparent heavy impact on fish.
Epidemiologists found high rates of leukemia and other illnesses asso-
ciated with chemical pollution among the nearby human population. A
protest committee called Help Our Polluted Environment formed in
1991, including among its charter members 15-year P&G employee
Linda Rowland and her cousin Stephanie McGuire, who jointly owned
a fishing camp. Rumor soon had it that P&G would close the aging
Buckeye plant, the major employer in Taylor County, rather than
invest in clean-up.
“Women in the group began receiving threatening phone
calls,” Douglas Helvarg reported in his 1994 book The War Against
The Greens, “including one from a caller who told them he would cut
out their tongues.” A local TV talk show host was taken off the air
after interviewing HOPE founder Joy Towles Cummings; the station
owner and a major advertiser said they had been threatened with arson.
The Rowland/McGuire fishing camp was repeatedly vandalized.
Pheasants they kept caged nearby were poisoned.
On April 7, 1992, according to McGuire, she greeted a boat
pulling up at their dock. She was alone at the camp. In the boat was “a
man dressed in camouflage,” Helvarg related. “He said he’d shot a
cow up the road and wanted the owner’s name. Feeling uneasy, she
began to head back to the house. Before she could get there, two other
men in camouflage and masks came out of the woods. One hit her on
the head with a rock and tossed the rock into the river.”
According to McGuire’s account, which Florida Department
of Law Enforcement spokesman John Joyce on July 14, 1993 said
“didn’t measure up to reality” after extensive review, the men burned
her with a cigar, cut her throat with a razor, and two of them raped her.
“One of her dogs,” Helvarg wrote, “a terrier named Boo-
boo, may have saved her life, attacking one of the men and biting him
in the face. He threw the dog in the river and, bleeding heavily from
his cheek, retreated to their boat. The other two followed.” One man
pointed a shotgun at McGuire as they sped away, she said, but lost his
balance.
“Following the attack,” Helvarg’s account goes on, “sher-
iff’s vehicles drove over the crime scene. Deputies who said there was
not enough blood on the ground to conform to McGuire’s story never
entered the blood-spattered house; nor did they ever interview her
neighbors, who went to help her and were the first on the scene after
the attack.” Helvarg also disputed the state crime lab finding that the
purported cigar burn had actually been made by a heated penny.
“Sheriff John Walker soon began suggesting that McGuire’s injuries
were the result of a lesbian quarrel between the cousins,” Helvarg
reported. “But McGuire said she had become pregnant from the rape
and suffered a miscarriage. Cummings was there when she took the
test and confirms that it came up positive.” Sheriff Walker issued an
affidavit charging McGuire with perjury; Florida state attorney Jerry
Blair refused to prosecute. Rowland and McGuire moved. The local
paper published their new address. “One of their Rottweilers was sub-
sequently poisoned with table scraps laced with antifreeze,” Helvarg
recounts. McGuire moved again and vanished from view.
According to Alice Swasy, in Soap Opera: The Inside Story
of Procter & Gamble, Blair was pressured to bring the perjury charge
by Buckeye public relations manager Dan Simmons. Said Blair to St.
Petersburg Times reporter Elizabeth Willson, “I think there’s been a
tremendous interest in proving that Ms. McGuire lied and I can’t prove
that. I think there is a perception down there that if it could be proven
in court, that instantly the image for the P&G plant would be changed
overnight, and that is not going to happen.”
In a postscript to the incident, Helvarg relates, an arsonist in
September 1993 razed the camp where McGuire was attacked.
Cummings and two friends saw smoke, drove to the scene, and found
Simmons photographing the ashes.
The McGuire case is without known parallel involving any
other U.S.-based P&G facility. P&G posted a $5,000 reward for infor-
mation leading to the arrest and conviction of McGuire’s attackers,
which remains unclaimed.
Meanwhile, Artzt closed 30 of P&G’s 150 factories and laid
off 13,000 workers, 12% of the company workforce. Buckeye
Cellulose employees led by former P&G executive Bob Cannon orga-
nized a new firm, Buckeye Florida, and bought a controlling interest
in the pulp mill rather than lose their jobs. The price included a $40
million five-year plan, announced in December 1994, to restore the
Fenholloway River to “fishable and swimmable” condition.
Amid the corporate restructuring, the P&G commitment to
reducing animal testing was unaffected.
