Shareholder Campaign > Wyeth

Wyeth is perhaps best known for its estrogen-replacement drug Premarin, but the company also manufacturers a wide range of other pharmaceuticals, over-the-counter drugs, nutritional supplements, and animal health care products. Animal testing conducted by Wyeth may be expressly required by government regulations (e.g., FDA testing requirements for pharmaceuticals), or it may be a voluntary activity on the company’s part to establish the safety of its products.

2004 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 Wyeth, a resolution was filed in the fall of 2003, calling on the company to do the following:

Issue a policy statement publicly committing to the use of in vitro tests for assessing skin corrosion, skin absorption, skin irritation, phototoxicity, and pyrogenicity endpoints and generally committing to the elimination of product testing on animals in favor of validated in vitro alternatives
Formally request that the relevant regulatory agencies accept validated in vitro tests as replacements for animal tests

Despite assurances in Wyeth’s “Animal Care Policy” that animal testing shall be limited to instances when “no non-animal alternatives exist to the proposed experiment,” the company 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 U.S.—to exclude our resolution from its proxy statement. However, the SEC staff did not concur with the company’s arguments and ordered Wyeth to publish the PETA-sponsored resolution in its shareholder proxy materials. PETA’s resolution was brought to a vote at Wyeth’s annual meeting in Morristown, New Jersey, on April 22, 2004. More than 21 million shares (2.5 percent) were voted in favor of the resolution.

2005 Resolution: Premarin Mare Protection

The following year, PETA and six of its members holding Wyeth stock filed a resolution to protect the pregnant mares used to produce Premarin (whose name is derived from “pregnant mares’ urine”). These horses are confined to stalls with rubber urine-collection bags strapped to their groins, unable to turn around or lie down comfortably for up to six months. When their worn-out bodies can no longer produce the amount of estrogen needed, they are slaughtered. Their foals suffer as well—male foals are fattened and sold for slaughter and sale in Asian food markets, and the females are sold for slaughter or used to replace their mothers on the production lines. PETA’s resolution calls on Wyeth to do the following:

Discontinue promoting Premarin and all related products until further review elucidates the risks that these drugs pose to women’s health
Inform shareholders about the viability of adopting a policy protecting all mares used in the production of the company’s products, including the options of buying out farmers and placing the mares in caring homes or surrendering them to rescue organizations

Wyeth again sought the SEC’s permission to exclude our resolution from its proxy statement. The SEC staff did not concur with any of the company’s arguments and ordered Wyeth to publish the PETA-sponsored resolution in its shareholder proxy materials.

PETA’s resolution was brought to a vote at Wyeth’s annual meeting in Morristown, New Jersey, on April 21, 2005. Approximately 14.5 million shares (1.7 percent) were voted in favor of the resolution.

By using stockholder resolutions to bring our issues to the attention of corporate policymakers, we can access a ready-made platform for arguing the case for changing corporate practices. 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 Wyeth, 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.

Wyeth published our resolution in its proxy materials along with its opposition statement advising shareholders to vote against it. Wyeth agreed to a discussion with PETA, which failed to result in an agreement to implement such measures. Thus, on April 27, 2006, a PETA representative traveled to Morristown, New Jersey, to present our resolution at the company's annual meeting. Our resolution garnered more than 221 million votes—a staggering 25.4 percent of the vote (an almost 1,500 percent increase over last year’s share), which qualifies it to be reintroduced in 2007.

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