Shareholder Campaign > Merck & Co.

Merck & Co. markets a wide range of prescription pharmaceuticals, over-the-counter consumer health care products, and animal care products. Government regulations require a certain amount of animal testing for pharmaceuticals, 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 Merck, 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” and its recognition of company scientists who strive to reduce animal testing, Merck took a position in opposition to our shareholder resolution. Nonetheless, PETA contacted Merck’s corporate secretary in a good-faith effort to establish a constructive dialogue as an alternative to bringing our resolution forward at the company’s annual meeting. However, in contrast to our experiences with other major companies, our “dialogue” with Merck was as nonproductive as it was brief.

PETA’s resolution was brought to a vote at Merck’s annual meeting in North Branch, New Jersey, on April 26, 2005. Almost 35 million shares (2.8 percent) were voted in favor of the resolution.

2006 Resolution: Animal Welfare Policy

In 2006, PETA submitted another resolution to Merck 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.

Merck published our resolution in its proxy materials, along with its opposition statement advising shareholders to vote against it. On April 25, 2006, a PETA representative traveled to North Branch, New Jersey, to present our resolution at the company’s annual meeting. Our resolution garnered almost 5 percent of the vote (more than 66 million shares), which qualifies it to be reintroduced in 2007.

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