Shareholder Campaign > DuPont

DuPont is a huge conglomerate operating in more than 70 countries with revenues of more than $27 billion in 2004. Its wide range of products include agricultural, electronic, communication, home construction, transportation, and apparel goods. Most of the animal testing at DuPont is conducted by the company’s chemical division, either voluntarily or as part of government-sponsored testing programs, including the Environmental Protection Agency’s high production volume (HPV) chemical-testing program. In the past, DuPont has proposed killing large numbers of animals in chemical-toxicity tests while ignoring existing data and public comments on its testing proposals, but it has recently become more responsive to the concerns of the animal protection community.

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 a PETA supporter who holds stock in DuPont, 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 its progressively worded “Animal Care and Use Policy,” DuPont took a position in opposition to our shareholder resolution. PETA’s resolution was brought to a vote at the company’s annual meeting in Wilmington, North Carolina, on April 27, 2005. Approximately 16 million shares (2.7 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 DuPont, 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.

Negotiations with DuPont prior to the annual meeting resulted in PETA’s withdrawal of the resolution.

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