Mike Hancock News
MP urges boycott of Herbal Essences shampoo
Mike Hancock, MP is urging consumers to boycott Herbal Essences shampoo in a parliamentary motion that he has tabled. This follows direct evidence obtained by the campaign group Uncaged that the makers of Herbal Essences, Proctor and Gamble (P&G) recently fed a chemical that is used in the shampoo called butylparaben to pregnant rats. Then just before the animals were due to give birth, they were killed in a gas chamber and their babies cut from lifeless bodies and in turn killed and dismembered.
However butylparaben was tested and declared safe many years ago. In particular, many tests have revealed that butylparaben is broken down into harmless substances when swallowed. What’s more, testing unrealistic huge doses on animals does not give reliable information about the effects on humans in the real world. A scientific expert has commented that this test ‘was a profligate and wasteful use of animals.’
There are many shampoos that people can buy instead of Herbal Essences that have not been tested on animals.
The MP has also accused the company of peddling half-truths about their testing of cosmetic products on animals.
The company claims on their website that “P&G has ended research involving animals on all our finished consumer products except where required by law.”
Mike says that this is misleading on three grounds:
• As the evidence obtained by Uncaged shows – it tests the individual chemicals that go into products.
• There is only a legal requirement to test chemicals on animals where the company uses new-to-the-world chemicals in their products in order to try and maximise profits.
• As a multi-national company, P&G can test chemicals on animals outside the UK even if such a test is illegal in this country and then market the products here in the UK. Mike Hancock said: “The media have been inundated with half-truths about P&G. It is now time for a campaign to force P&G to be more honest and really stop testing their products on animals. I don’t believe that the vast majority of people want cosmetics tested unnecessarily on animals. And it is clear from their actions so far that Proctor and Gamble far will only listen if consumers stop buying their products – and hit them where it hurts on their bottom line.”
Uncaged also say that despite P&G claiming to be investing in alternatives to animal testing, their own scientific papers show that some of these proposed “alternatives” are merely slightly less severe types of animal tests, rather than truly humane, non-animal alternatives.
Uncaged also claim that P&G are spending large sums of money developing new animal tests to allow them to market novel types of substances such as nanoparticles into their cosmetics. The group calculates that for every £10, Proctor and Gamble spend on advertising, they spend only 1p on developing alternatives to animal testing.
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