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Emmy Award–winning reporter María Celeste Arrarás is joining PETA in issuing an urgent plea to the National Watermelon Promotion Board to stop its seedy practice of paying experimenters to sicken, slice open, and suffocate animals to death in cruel and pointless tests.
Experimenters funded by the fruit group have tormented hundreds of mice and rats in painful tests that are neither required by law nor relevant to human health. They’ve done the following and more:
- Repeatedly force-fed rats watermelon, injected them with a carcinogen, killed them, and dissected them
- Fed rats a high-fat diet, suffocated them, took their blood, then sliced them open
- Fed rats watermelon, repeatedly injected them with a carcinogen to cause colon cancer, killed them, and dissected them
- Fed rats a high-fat diet and a chemical that causes colon inflammation, starved them, suffocated them, and sliced them open
- Fed mice a high-fat diet with watermelon, starved them, injected them with sugar, bled them from their tails, punctured their hearts, broke their necks, then dissected them
The experiments are done in an attempt to promote human health claims for marketing watermelon to consumers, but because humans are vastly different from mice and rats, the tests’ results are irrelevant to human health.
If that weren’t enough, these experiments are bankrolled by mandatory assessment fees that struggling farmers are forced to pay to the board.
“Many farmers in today’s economy are struggling. They don’t need barbaric tests on animals to sell their agricultural commodities. Rather, they need economic relief from inflated assessment fees that are wasted on worthless experiments on animals. We are firmly against taxing farmers to fund needless and senseless animal tests.” —Jillian Hishaw, Esq. LL.M (Agricultural Law), Founding Director, F.A.R.M.S.
Watermelon has a long history of safe human consumption. Instead of killing animals, researchers could use safe, superior human studies and other advanced, animal-free methods to achieve human-relevant results.
What You Can Do
It doesn’t have to be this way. Following talks with PETA and e-mails from thousands of our supporters, the Hass Avocado and National Mango boards have adopted policies banning the funding of animal tests. Numerous other major food and beverage manufacturers have, too. It’s time the National Watermelon Promotion Board did the same.
Please take action by urging it to stop funding any experiments on animals.
You can do so by sending polite comments to:
Mark Arney
Executive Director/CEO
National Watermelon Promotion Board
[email protected]
Then, use the form below to contact other board leadership. After you take action, you’ll see an easy way to share this information. Please ask five friends or relatives to support this campaign!