Shareholder Campaign > Johnson & Johnson

Johnson & Johnson (J&J) is one of the largest research-based health care companies in the world, producing a broad range of health care products, including pharmaceuticals, medical devices and over-the-counter drugs. Government regulations do prescribe a certain amount of animal testing for medical products; however, companies are afforded a certain degree of flexibility to choose the tests they will use to establish the safety and effectiveness of a new substance or formulation.

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 J&J, a resolution was filed in the fall of 2004 calling on the company to:

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 interest 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.

J&J took a position in opposition to our shareholder resolution, and sought permission from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—the agency responsible for administering federal securities laws in the US—to exclude our resolution from its proxy statement. The SEC staff did not concur with the company's position.

Following the SEC´s ruling, PETA contacted J&J´s corporate secretary in an effort to establish a dialogue in lieu of bringing our resolution forward at the company´s annual meeting. Subsequent teleconferences and face-to-face meetings resulted in an ongoing dialogue that led PETA to voluntarily withdraw its shareholder resolution.

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