PETA Supporters Confront CEO of Ajinomoto, Makers Of MSG, Multi Brand Owners, Over Painful, Deadly Tests On Dogs, Rabbits, Rats, Other Animals

New York — PETA supporters with signs proclaiming, “Ajinomoto: Ban Cruel Animal Tests Now!” and “Starved, Killed, Dissected,” gathered Thursday outside Columbia Business School’s Geffen Hall after confronting Hiroshi Kaho, president and CEO of the U.S. subsidiary of Ajinomoto, who was a guest speaker at an event there.

Ajinomoto is the world’s largest manufacturer of monosodium glutamate (MSG). The company, which also owns packaged frozen-food brands Tai Pei, Ling Ling, and José Olé, has since the 1950s conducted pointless and painful tests on animals to market its products.

“For decades, Ajinomoto has tormented thousands of dogs, guinea pigs, rabbits, and other vulnerable animals, who feel pain just as we do, just to make dubious human health claims for marketing its foods and seasonings,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA is calling on Ajinomoto to join dozens of other global food giants that have ended animal tests and switched to superior, non-animal research.”

Ajinomoto-funded experimenters have cut open dogs’ stomachs, inserted tubes, starved them, given them liquid diets with MSG, and injected them with drugs. They have starved, killed, and dissected rabbits and compelled mice to fight each other and cut their nerves. They’ve inserted tubes into the arteries of day-old piglets and starved them, and they’ve electroshocked rats.

PETA’s global campaign has garnered more than 300,000 e-mails from supporters calling on Ajinomoto executives to end the company’s tests on animals that aren’t required by law. Earlier this month, British post-punk icon Siouxsie Sioux sent a letter to Ajinomoto Co. President and CEO Taro Fujie urging the company to ban animal tests, and activists have also called for such a ban in eye-catching protests.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is the largest animal rights organization in the world, and PETA entities have more than 9 million members and supporters globally. PETA opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview, and focuses its attention on the four areas in which the largest numbers of animals suffer the most intensely for the longest periods of time: in laboratories, in the food industry, in the clothing trade, and in the entertainment business. We also work on a variety of other issues, including the cruel killing of rodents, birds, and other animals who are often considered “pests” as well as cruelty to domesticated animals. PETA works through public education, investigative newsgathering and reporting, research, animal rescue, legislation, special events, celebrity involvement, and protest campaigns.