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Sumi Tomo Demo
By Sarah Roberts
August 6th – 2003 DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES – Last Chance for Animals joined Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty in downtown Los Angeles to protest Japanese corporation Sumi Tomo’s involvement with Huntingdon Life Sciences. SHAC America (www.shacamerica.net) explains, 

“Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) is one of the world's largest product testing labs. HLS tests agrochemicals (such as pesticides), household products (detergent, oven cleaner, etc.), some pharmaceutical products (including Baycol - an anti-cholesterol drug that went on to kill 180 people), and highly controversial Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO's). Approximately 500 animals die every day in these tests. HLS uses every animal from rats and mice, to dogs, cats and rabbits, to primates and farm animals. 

HLS is a CRO, or Contract Research Organization. As such, it does not conduct research and development, meaning it does not create its own products and does not search for cures for diseases. Rather, HLS is contracted by other companies to conduct toxicity testing for *their* products. These tests essentially consist of forcing a product into an animal's stomach, lungs, or onto his/her skin for weeks or months on end, then killing the animal and dissecting him/her.

In addition to HLS's daily job described above, the lab has been exposed in 5 undercover investigations since 1989, revealing horrendous animal cruelty and sloppy, fraudulent sciences. HLS workers were filmed punching four-month-old beagle puppies in the face, dissecting a live monkey, and falsifying their own research reports.”

The Los Angeles protest of Sumi Tomo featured the Animal News Van, a rock star celebrity, and numerous angered public protestors, who held up a powerful symbol of the suffering and death that occurs in just one day of normal operation at HLS – 500 beagle dog collars linked together. Beagle puppies are experimented on routinely at HLS, because of the beagle’s gentle nature and desire to please people. Activists angered by the absue of the loving trust of gentle beagles held up the linked dog collars, which stretched hundreds of feet around Sumi Tomo’s Los Angeles corporate offices. They chanted in unison to educate passerbys and to let Sumi Tomo know that its crimes will not go unnoticed. 

Sumi Tomo’s shameful association with HLS was featured in a thirty minute television presentation by Japanese TV, which aired in Hong Kong and the surrounding areas. The television program included footage of the downtown Los Angeles protest, undercover video clips of HLS’s animal abuse, as well as explained that Sumi Tomo’s Chemical Division sponsors toxicity testing for industrial chemical use at HLS. The program will also be aired in the United States in Japanese, and then with translations into Chinese and English.

Check back to watch for a downloadable version of the TV presentation which aired about Sumi Tomo.

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