Shareholder Campaign > Barr Pharmaceuticals

Barr Pharmaceuticals, Inc., is a holding company with two main subsidiaries, Barr Laboratories, Inc., and Duramed Pharmaceuticals, that focus on generic and proprietary drugs, respectively. Barr and Duramed develop, manufacture, and market more than 100 different products. Government regulations require a certain amount of animal testing for pharmaceuticals, but companies are afforded some flexibility to choose which tests 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 and replace 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 Barr Pharmaceuticals, a resolution was filed in the fall of 2004 calling on the company to do the following:

Commit to using only non-animal methods to assess 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 the approved non-animal alternatives described in the resolution, along with any others that are currently used and accepted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and other developed countries.

Despite Barr's response that "[w]e follow a policy that includes identifying, developing and using alternatives to laboratory animal testing whenever possible," Barr recommended that its shareholders vote against our resolution. PETA's resolution was voted on at Barr's annual meeting in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, on November 3, 2005. Approximately 1.25 million shares were voted in favor of the resolution.

Although shareholder resolutions almost never win the required number of votes when they are first proposed, they do provide an opportunity to educate management, boards, and other shareholders about important issues, which can lead to long-term change.

2006 Resolution: Animal Welfare Policy

In 2006, PETA submitted another resolution to Barr Labs, 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. Barr Labs is unusual among large drug discovery companies in its failure to post any animal welfare policy on its Web site.

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.

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

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