Shareholder Campaign > Bristol-Myers Squibb

Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) markets a wide range of prescription pharmaceuticals, infant formulas, children’s nutritional products, medical-imaging machinery, specialized wound dressings, and other medical supplies. Government regulations require a certain amount of animal testing for medical products, 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 BMS, 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 BMS is “committed to reducing reliance on animal-testing methods” and is promoting the “development, validation, and use of non-animal tests” the company took a position in opposition to our shareholder resolution. PETA’s resolution was brought to a vote at BMS’ annual meeting in Wilmington, Delaware, on May 3, 2005. More than 37 million shares (3 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 BMS, 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 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 a client.

BMS challenged our resolution at the SEC, partly on the grounds that since animals cannot communicate their needs, the company was not responsible for addressing them. The SEC ruled in PETA’s favor and ordered BMS to publish the PETA-sponsored resolution in its shareholder proxy materials. BMS published our resolution along with its opposition statement advising shareholders to vote against it.

The company subsequently agreed to a discussion with PETA, and as a result, BMS agreed to amend its agreements with contract laboratories to require adherence to the company’s animal welfare standards. However, a settlement including ongoing meetings with PETA was not reached before the company’s annual meeting.

Thus, on May 2, 2006, a PETA representative traveled to Wilmington, Delaware, to present its resolution at the annual meeting along with an expression of our desire to cultivate a dialogue with BMS that would make it unnecessary for us to present further resolutions at the company’s annual meetings. Our resolution garnered almost 60 million shares and more than 5 percent of the vote, which qualified it to be reintroduced in 2007.

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