PHOTO: Ajinomoto Execs Faced PETA ‘Rabbit’ Ruckus at Shareholder Meeting Over Cruel Animal Tests 

Tokyo — Armed with spoof “Ajipanda bottles” labeled “seasoning that kills animals,” a group of PETA supporters dressed as rabbits descended upon the entrance to Ajinomoto Co. Inc.’s annual shareholder meeting to condemn the company’s cruel and deadly tests in which dogs, pigs, mice, and other animals have been experimented on in attempts to make dubious health claims for marketing its food products and ingredients.

Inside the meeting, a representative for the group confronted executives over the company’s continued funding of experiments on animals that aren’t required by law in an “egregious violation of Ajinomoto’s animal testing policy” to replace, reduce, and refine the use of animals. The full text of PETA Asia’s shareholder question is available upon request. 

Where:             Ajinomoto Group Takanawa Training Center, 3-13-65 Takanawa, Minato-ku, Tokyo   Google Map here.

When:               Tuesday, June 25, 9 a.m.

“Ajinomoto has condemned thousands of animals to gruesome and painful deaths in scientifically worthless experiments, all just to make questionable marketing claims for its products,” says PETA Senior Vice President Jason Baker. “PETA is calling on Ajinomoto to end its decades-long run of tormenting animals and embrace the modern, human-relevant research that many of its competitors have already adopted.”

Since the 1950s, Ajinomoto experimenters have cut open dogs’ stomachs, starved them, and fed them MSG; forced mice to fight each other, cut their nerves, and injected them with toxic drugs; inserted tubes into day-old piglets’ arteries and starved them; and electroshocked rats, among other pointless procedures. Dozens of other food and beverage companies around the world have stopped contributing to animal tests after talking with PETA entities.

PETA Asia—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information about PETA Asia’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETAAsia.com or follow the group on X, Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram.

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