UPDATE, July 2018:
We did it again! After years of investigative work by the Animal Welfare Foundation, its partners in Uruguay, and hundreds of thousands of SumOfUs members taking action, the next pharma giant -- Germany’s IDT Biologika -- has cut ties with torturous blood farms in South America!
Together, last year we moved MSD, and together this time we pushed IDT Biologika to change its ways. Thank you for helping make this happen!
Big pharma is making huge profits from the torture of horses. Thousands of horses are raised purely for the purpose of having their blood extracted and sold -- with dire consequences.
It’s a sickening business that the SumOfUs community has been standing up against for months -- and we’ve made important progress in our fight to stop it.
After SumOfUs members raised the alarm, a major pharma company, Merck, Sharpe and Dohme (MSD), changed its policy.
But blood farms will still operate as long as there are pharma companies willing to buy their products. Can you help push the next big player, Germany's IDT Biologika, to cut ties with blood farms? We’ll be delivering your voices straight to IDT Biologika’s headquarters in less than two weeks -- so please add your name now.
Blood farm conditions are worse than you’d ever imagine.
On farms in Uruguay and Argentina, our partners revealed that workers routinely take 10 litres of blood from the horse in a single extraction -- almost a fourth of its total blood. That much blood loss can lead to hypovolemic shock, anaemia or even death.
It’s a hormone called PMSG that the pharma industry is after. Because the valuable hormone can only be found in the blood of mares in their early pregnancy, they are forced into repeated pregnancies and abortions. Finally, they are shipped off to be slaughtered once they’re too weak or old to become pregnant.
In a cruel cycle of animal exploitation, the precious hormone obtained from pregnant mare blood is used by the pig industry to make the industrial production of piglets even more efficient.
More and more politicians, organizations and regular people like you and me are speaking out against this horrific practice. If we keep up the pressure, we can get IDT Biologika to cut ties with the most notorious blood farms we know about.
After years of investigative work by the Animal Welfare Foundation, its partners in Uruguay and the USA, and hundreds of thousands of SumOfUs members taking action, Merck, Sharp and Dohme (MSD) is no longer getting horse blood from blood farms in South America.
It’s proof that when we come together with strong partners and amazing members like you, we have the power to shift large corporations.
Now it’s time to get IDT Biologika to make a move. They've never been hit by a campaign like this before -- so tens of thousands of us coming together to hold IDT Biologika accountable can make all the difference!
More information
Animal Welfare Foundation.
The Dodo. 2 October 2015.
Sueddeutsche Zeitung. 29 September 2015.
Animal Welfare Foundation.