Shareholder Campaign: General Electric

General Electric (GE) is a leading diversified manufacturer that markets a wide range of products for the generation, transmission, distribution, control, and utilization of electricity. Over the years, it has developed or acquired new technologies and services that have considerably broadened the scope of its activities. Most of the animal testing at GE is conducted by the company's chemical division, either voluntarily or as part of government-sponsored testing programs, including the Environmental Protection Agency's high production volume (HPV) chemical-testing program. While GE states that all its testing under the HPV chemical-testing program has been completed, the company has been one of the worst corporate offenders in the program by repeatedly proposing to kill large numbers of animals in toxicity tests while ignoring existing data and public comments on its testing proposals.

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 a PETA supporter who holds stock in GE, 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 to animal tests

PETA's resolution was presented at GE's annual meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, on April 28, 2004. More than 229 million shares (3.86 percent) were voted in favor of the resolution, a number large enough to allow us to introduce the resolution again the following year. Although substantially similar to the previous proposal, PETA's 2004 resolution was expanded to request that the company 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," GE 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, arguing that it dealt with ordinary business matters that are not subject to a vote by stockholders. The SEC staff did not concur with any of the company's arguments and ordered GE to publish the PETA-sponsored resolution in its shareholder proxy materials.

After the SEC's ruling, PETA contacted GE'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. Despite a productive teleconference call and indications that GE might be amenable to a series of terms proposed by PETA in exchange for the voluntary withdrawal of our resolution, an agreement was never finalized. PETA's resolution was brought to a vote at GE's annual meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio, on April 27, 2005. Almost 207 million shares (3.3 percent) were voted in favor of the resolution.

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 General Electric, 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.

GE again challenged our resolution at the SEC, partly on the grounds that since animals cannot communicate their own needs, the company was not responsible for addressing them. Again, the SEC ruled in PETA's favor and ordered GE to publish the PETA-sponsored resolution in its shareholder proxy materials. GE published our resolution, along with its opposition statement advising shareholders to vote against it.

Negotiations with GE prior to the annual meeting resulted in withdrawal of the resolution.