W.K. Kellogg Foundation Reverses Stance, Moves Away From Animal Tests

After PETA Appeal, Billion-Dollar Foundation Says It No Longer Supports or Funds Animal Tests, Which Had Involved Injecting Dogs With Cocaine

For Immediate Release:
September 9, 2019

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Following discussions with PETA, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation—the eighth-largest philanthropic foundation in the U.S., founded in 1930 by Kellogg Company founder Will Keith Kellogg, with more than $7.6 billion in assets—has confirmed that, after decades of supporting invasive and deadly experiments on animals, its current “grantmaking framework does not include funding or support for programs that involve animal testing.”

Experiments funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation published from the 1940s through 2018 cumulatively used more than 8,000 dogs, hamsters, guinea pigs, mice, mongooses, monkeys, rabbits, rats, and other animals. During some of these tests, experimenters infected rabbits and monkeys with parasitic flatworms, causing one monkey to die prematurely from an infection, after which the others were killed and dissected; cut open dogs’ chests, injected cocaine solutions into their arteries, inserted electrodes into their hearts and legs, and then killed and dissected them; and cut off the carotid arteries of baby rats to reduce blood flow to the brain, put them in a box with insufficient oxygen for two to three hours, and then killed and dissected them. Some other recent tests involved injecting pregnant mice with chemicals and restraining mice in tubes.

“Depriving baby rats of oxygen and pumping dogs full of cocaine teaches us nothing about human health and wastes research dollars,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “Replacing archaic and cruel animal tests with superior, animal-free research methods is a win for the children served by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and PETA calls on other charities to follow suit.”

In its correspondence with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation starting in March, PETA pointed out that studies confirm that the vast physiological differences between humans and other animals render data from animal experiments misleading, irreproducible, and inapplicable to human health.

In January, after extensive discussions with PETA that spanned more than 11 years, cereal giant the Kellogg Company (which is separate from the foundation) adopted a new policy ending the use of animal tests involving food products or ingredients when not explicitly required by law.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.