Colgate-Palmolive halts animal testing

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1999:

NEW YORK, N.Y.––Colgate-Palmolive
Co., committedly reducing animal use since 1983,
in mid-March 1998 announced an immediate moratorium
on all animal use in safety-testing personal
care products.
Colgate-Palmolive told media that “98%
of all internal requests for product safety approval
are currently met using available data and non-animal
alternatives.”
Colgate-Palmolive does not make pharmaceuticals,
which by law must be animal-tested.
PETA president Ingrid Newkirk told
Associated Press that the Colgate-Palmolive moratorium
resulted from a 20-month PETA boycott.

However, at invitation of the late Henry
Spira, founder of Animal Rights International,
Colgate-Palmolive in 1983 joined with Procter &
Gamble, Bristol Myers-Squibb, and other leading
consumer product manufacturers to fund the Johns
Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing.
Between 1983 and 1991, ColgatePalmolive
cut laboratory animal use from 4,267 to
907. The numbers shot back up to 4,950 and 2,515
in 1992 and 1993, in connection with validating an
“artificial mouth” model for oral health care product
research and building a new cell culture laboratory.
Both projects were intended to enable further
reductions of animal use once complete––and did.
Colgate-Palmolive annual spending on
alternatives to animal testing stood at $472,000 in
1983, rising to $1.4 million by 1993.
By the time the PETA boycott was
declared in 1997, the eventual suspension of further
animal use appeared to be already in sight.