PETA Calls for Company to Disclose Its Efforts to Properly Oversee, Care for Animals Used in Experiments
For Immediate Release:
May 22, 2012
Contact:
Kristin Richards 202-483-7382
Westlake Village, Calif. -- Wearing dog and monkey masks and holding signs that read, "Amgen Is Hell for Animals" and "Dogs Tortured in Painful Experiments," members of PETA—an Amgen stockholder—will gather outside the Westlake Village Four Seasons hotel as shareholders arrive for the company's annual meeting on Wednesday. Inside the meeting, a PETA representative will speak in support of the group's shareholder resolution calling on Amgen to disclose what steps it's taking to ensure proper animal-care and laboratory oversight in its own facilities and at contract laboratories, as well as its plans to promote non-animal testing methods:
Date: Wednesday, May 23
Time: 10 a.m.
Place: Four Seasons, 2 Dole Dr. (near the intersection with Via Colinas), Westlake Village
"Shareholders have a right to know what Amgen plans to do in order to save the thousands of animals it uses from suffering and to promote modern, humane non-animal research methods," says PETA Senior Director of Regulatory Testing Jessica Sandler. "Amgen discloses very specific details about its environmental efforts—PETA is simply seeking the same transparency regarding the company's use of animals in painful experiments,"
Amgen's animal welfare policy does not include any specific information on safeguarding animal welfare or incorporating non-animal testing methods. The company's animal experimentation oversight committee was recently cited by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for failing to oversee painful and invasive experiments properly and to review significant changes to experimental protocols involving dogs. Amgen also has done business with notorious contract laboratory Covance, where an investigator documented that workers struck primates and threw them against cages and that primates circled frantically in their cages, pulling out their hair and chewing at their own flesh.
For more information, please visit PETA.org.