Animals Beheaded for Blueberries? ‘Farmer Tax’ Funds Cruel Tests

Campaign Updates Action Center

Experimenters are douching, poisoning, force-feeding, starving, radiating, bleeding, suffocating, beheading, and dissecting animals, purportedly to establish health claims used to market blueberries, watermelons, and other common foods to consumers.

Funding for these worthless and deadly experiments comes from a portion of the hundreds of millions of dollars in annual fees that farmers are required to pay to agricultural commodity research and promotion (R&P) boards. These fees—levied on agricultural commodity producers, handlers, processors, importers, and others—totaled $885 million in 2016 alone, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

Many of the 21 R&P boards waste some of this money on horrific experiments on animals for marketing agricultural commodities. Here are just two:

• The Mushroom Council paid experimenters to feed pigs white button mushrooms, repeatedly poke their anuses, take their blood, and kill and dissect them.


• The U.S. Highbush Blueberry Council paid experimenters to feed rats strawberries or blueberries, force them to perform a series of stress-inducing tests (including grabbing wires while suspended, walking and balancing on accelerating rotating rods, and swimming in a maze), repeatedly inject them with a chemical, and kill and dissect them. Five rats were killed before the experiment even ended due to excessive weight loss, likely caused by stress.

More than 2,600 sensitive and intelligent mice, rats, and pigs were used in harmful and invasive tests funded by R&P boards between 2015 and 2019.

These experiments were used to market common products that have a long and safe history of human consumption. Instead of torturing animals, safe and effective human studies and other advanced, non-animal methods that yield human-relevant results can be used.

The results of experiments on animals are neither applicable to humans nor required by law. Other animals are scientifically inappropriate stand-ins for humans, in part because of the vast physiological differences between species.

Following discussions with PETA, the Hass Avocado Board, the National Mango Board, and the National Watermelon Promotion Board agreed to end funding for tests on animals, as have dozens of major food and beverage manufacturers.

Please take action and help PETA keep up the pressure on R&P boards to prohibit gouging farmers with fees that fund inhumane, junk-science experiments on animals.

You can do so by sending polite comments to the following:

Tim Lust
CEO
United Sorghum Checkoff Program
[email protected]

Kasey Cronquist
President
US Highbush Blueberry Council
[email protected]

Henry Bierlink
Executive Director
Washington Red Raspberry Commission
[email protected]

Feel free to use our talking points (but remember that using your own words is always more effective):

• Please adopt a public policy that bans the funding of all animal tests. Results from animal experiments are inaccurate because there are drastic physiological differences between humans and other species.
• Your peers including the Hass Avocado Board, the National Mango Board, and the National Watermelon Promotion Board, as well as dozens of major food and beverage manufacturers, have already prohibited animal testing to establish human health claims for marketing products and ingredients.
• Mandatory assessment fees paid by farmers shouldn’t be used to fund animal tests that aren’t explicitly required by law.

Then, use the form below to contact other R&P boards.

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