I never use Iams pet foods.  Because my cats need prescription food to address a very specific issue for Kako, because the food I use is the most highly recommended by my veterinarians, and because Iams products have inherently been unwelcome by my pets (dogs and cats alike), there has never been a need in my house to purchase their products.  I do know people who use them, however, and now I have reason to tell them to switch to a different brand.

Imagine my horror to learn only recently that Iams has made the torture, mutilation, mistreatment, and killing of animals (from cats to dogs to rabbits to chicks to…) a part of their normal research and product development.  The abuse of animals performed by Iams even breached Proctor & Gamble’s own “Animal Welfare Research Policy” which was forced on the company by shareholders offended by Iams’ practices.  To add insult to injury, Iams even funded research by a doctor at Wright State University who had been charged formally by the USDA for willfully violating the federal Animal Welfare Act (subsequently settled out of court by the university, as it did not wish to face trial).

Despite being a PETA-organized site (I abhor PETA for their tactics, although I agree in principle with their intent), all you need to know about the Iams terror is at Iams Cruelty.  It took me hours to get through the site.  The horrors were too much for me to absorb in one sitting, therefore I had to walk away from it repeatedly and come back to it later.  The biggest problem?  My tears were interfering with my ability to comprehend the material I was reading.  I could not help lamenting what I was seeing: a company sworn to providing for pets intentionally torturing, killing, mutilating, and mistreating them in the name of research.  Would consumers think they were doing the best for their pets if they truly understood what buying Iams products was actually funding?

Iams appears to be guilty of offenses against animals that no one should tolerate.  It horrifies me to think that a company misrepresents itself as caring for animals while it secretly conducts barbarous research on them and mistreats them with obvious disdain.  All I can recommend is that you visit the site and gain a clear understanding about what Iams is doing to the animals they claim to protect.  This is hypocrisy at its most horrendous.

There is a video at the site showing what the PETA investigator found at the Iams research lab.  While I cannot stress enough that it is worth your time in order to understand the horrors taking place there, I will also warn you that it is more than disturbing.  I wept and could not watch it in a single sitting.  I was forced to walk away from it several times in order to gain my composure and ability to sit for a few more moments to watch more of it.  You see animals kept in cages that cannot provide comfort, treated like commodities and slabs of meat, existing in conditions that make them fear and even abhor the presence of humans, given only minimal care equivalent to brutality, forced to insanity by their captivity and horrendous treatment, physically mutilated to induce disease or further research into food products, and a great many other terrible sights that should overwhelm even the most stoic of hearts.  My very being was offended by what I beheld.

I contain no words to communicate properly the offense that Iams has committed.  A company billing itself as caring for animals, manufacturing products to ensure the health and welfare of pets, conducts itself in direct contradiction of that claim and intentionally harms the very pets that it deceives consumers into believing that it cares for.  It offends me on levels I did not deem possible.  Until the company demonstrates with third-party confirmation that such practices have been halted entirely, that they are no longer funding torturous experiments by modern day Dr. Frankensteins, and that they have abandoned for all time the abuse and murder of animals, I strongly recommend that you boycott the company.  If that proves insufficient, perhaps a boycott of Proctor & Gamble as a whole will be in order, not to mention any company that does business with them.