Body Shop skeletons rattle

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1998:

LONDON––London Greenpeace,
whose pamphleteers David Morris and Helen
Steel were vindicated in 1997 after an eightyear
battle with McDonald’s restaurants when
a British court found McDonald’s “culpably
responsible” for animal abuse by patronizing
factory farms, on February 27 attacked a new
target: The Body Shop cosmetics empire,
already fighting lawsuits from franchisees and
suppliers alleging fraud in Brazil, Canada,
France, Spain, Great Britain, and the U.S.
“The Body Shop has manufactured
an image of being a caring company that is
helping to protect the environment and indigenous
peoples, and preventing the suffering of
animals,” London Greenpeace said. “They do
not help the plight of animals or indigenous
peoples, and their products are far from what
they’re cracked up to be.”

Most of the London Greenpeace
broadside addressed economic and human
rights issues, but of animals it said,
“Although the Body Shop maintains that they
are ‘against animal testing,’” they do not
always make clear that many of the ingredients
in their products have been tested on animals
by other companies, causing much pain and
suffering to those animals. They accept ingredients
tested on animals before 1991, or those
tested since then (if they were animal-tested
for some purpose other than for cosmetics).
There continue to be concerns about the
enforcement of their policy. Also, some Body
Shop items contain animal products such as
gelatin (crushed bone). “
Freelance investigative reporter Jon
Entine documented the holes in The Body
Shop’s “against animal testing” policy in
1994, as reported in the October 1994 edition
of ANIMAL PEOPLE. The Body Shop
declined an opportunity to respond, but escalated
media attacks on European Commission
animal testing requirements, parallel to EC
and British Department of Trade and Industry
rulings that in product labeling “any reference
to testing on animals must state clearly
whether the tests carried out involved the finished
products and/or its ingredients.”
In the U.S., The Body Shop joined
with the Coalition for Consumer Information
on Cosmetics, a nine-member group assembled
by the Doris Day Animal League, to promote
a “Corporate Standard of Compassion
for Animals,” billed as “a new national benchmark
for non-animal testing for cosmetics and
household products.” If anything came of it
beyond the debut press conference in
November 1996, the evidence never reached
ANIMAL PEOPLE.
The full text of the London Greenpeace
statement is on the World Wide Web at
>>http://www.mcspotlight.org/<<.