Shareholder Campaign > Abbott Laboratories

Abbott Laboratories is one of the largest research-based health care companies in the world, producing a broad range of diagnostic and pharmaceutical products. Government regulations require a certain amount of animal testing for pharmaceuticals, but companies are afforded flexibility in choosing the tests that they use to establish the safety and effectiveness of new products.

2005 Resolution: Give the Animals 5

PETA’s “Give the Animals 5” Campaign calls on companies to abandon five crude and cruel animal tests, replacing them with state-of-the-art and scientifically valid non-animal methods that are already in use in other countries. With the help of PETA supporters who hold stock in Abbott Laboratories, a resolution was filed in the fall of 2004, calling on the company to do the following:

Commit specifically to using only non-animal methods for assessing skin corrosion, skin irritation, skin absorption, phototoxicity, and pyrogenicity


Confirm that it is in the company’s best interests to commit to replacing animal-based tests with non-animal methods
Petition the relevant regulatory agencies requiring safety testing for the company’s products to accept as total replacements for animal-based methods those approved non-animal methods described above, along with any others currently used and accepted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and other developed countries

Despite assurances that “Abbott’s approach is to employ the ‘3Rs’ whenever possible, which include refining experimental procedures to avoid or minimize unnecessary pain or suffering; reducing the number of animals used in any tests we conduct to the minimum to get valid results; and replacing the need for animal testing through alternative research methods,” the company took a position in opposition to our shareholder resolution. PETA’s resolution was brought to a vote at Abbott’s annual meeting in Abbott Park, Illinois, on April 22, 2005. Approximately 26 million shares (2.5 percent) were voted in favor of the resolution.

Although shareholder resolutions almost never win the required number of votes the first time that they are proposed, they do provide an opportunity to educate management, boards, and other shareholders about important issues, leading to change over the long term.

2006 Resolution: Animal Welfare Policy

In 2006, PETA submitted another resolution to Abbott, calling on the company to extend its animal welfare policy to include social and behavioral enrichment measures for the animals used and to ensure that any outside contract testing laboratories used also comply with the policy.

The resolution was largely the result of the horrors uncovered in the independent contract testing laboratory, Covance Inc., whose officials boast that they have every major company as their client.

Abbott challenged PETA’s resolution at the SEC. Unfortunately, the SEC ruled in Abbott’s favor and PETA’s animal welfare policy resolution was not presented nor voted on at Abbott this year.

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