Shareholder Campaign > Altria

Altria Group is a parent company whose primary holdings include the Philip Morris companies (as well as Kraft Foods). Philip Morris USA is the largest tobacco company in the United States and has about 50 percent of the U.S. cigarette market share. Philip Morris International is an international tobacco company that has seven of the top 20 global cigarette brands.

Animals react very differently to tobacco smoke exposure from the way humans do, never getting lung cancers in decades of smoking experiments on animals. Despite this, or probably because of this, Philip Morris continues to conduct a great deal of animal testing of its tobacco products to try to prove that the product is less dangerous than it seems. This animal testing is purely optional and is not required by the U.S. or other governments.

2005 Resolution: Eliminate Animal Testing for Tobacco Products

PETA filed a resolution at Altria asking that the company cease all use of animals for the testing of tobacco products. Animals respond very differently from humans to exposure to tobacco smoke; the most important difference is that in decades of experimentation, animals do not develop lung cancer even when hooked up around-the-clock to smoke ventilation machines. In fact, the tobacco industry used this fact to “prove” the safety of cigarette smoking and delay official recognition of smoking’s dangers for more than a decade despite strong epidemiological evidence to the contrary.

PETA´s resolution pointed out that animal inhalation studies do not correspond to human epidemiological evidence with respect to assessing the carcinogenic potential of smoking cigarettes, that testing tobacco products on animals is cruel and irrelevant, and that countries such as Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have placed limits or bans on the testing of tobacco products on animals. We asked Altria to follow their lead and commit to eliminating all further use of animals in the testing of tobacco, tobacco derivatives, and tobacco-related products.

A PETA representative traveled to Altria´s April 28, 2005, annual meeting in East Hanover, New Jersey, to present our resolution, which got more than 31 million votes (more than 2.5 percent of the vote) but, unfortunately, did not pass the hurdle required to bring it back the following year.

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 Altria, calling on the company to develop and make publicly accessible an animal welfare policy that would include reducing the numbers of animals used, provide social and behavioral enrichment measures to the animals used, and apply to any outside laboratories used.

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 a client.

Altria published our resolution in its proxy materials, along with its opposition statement advising shareholders to vote against it. On April 27, 2006, a PETA representative traveled to East Hanover, New Jersey, to present our resolution at Altria’s annual meeting. Our resolution garnered 3.6 percent of the vote (more than 44 million shares), which qualified it to be reintroduced in 2007.

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