When it comes to animal testing, we’ve got just one word: Nope. We don’t like it. We don’t do it. And we think those still engaged in this barbaric practice should stop immediately if not sooner. There are plenty of technologies we can and do use instead to verify the safety of our products, and there’s no excuse whatsoever for torturing bunnies and others in the name of commerce, or anything else for that matter. Frankly, when it comes to animal testing, we’ve got an attitude. And now we’ve got an award to show for it.

In January 2006, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) awarded Seventh Generation its Trail Blazer Award for “for blazing the cruelty-free trail with safe, effective, and environmentally friendly products that make cleaning a joy for humans and animals.”

The award recognizes our efforts to create healthy toxin-free products without the use of animal testing, thereby giving people the opportunity to protect not only the planet but the animals that inhabit it.

We’ve been on PETA’s list of companies that don’t believe in animal testing for a decade now, and the PETA award is simply recognition of the work we’ve done all along to keep animals from harm.

“Jeffrey Hollender is making it easier for consumers to save animals every time they shop,” said PETA Caring Consumer Project Coordinator Ann Marie Dori when announcing the award. “‘Cruelty-free’ has become a household word, and this is our way of thanking one of the pioneers who helped make it happen.”

Making it happen, of course, wasn’t always easy. When we started our company, animal testing was still a relatively obscure issue and very much a common practice, especially among companies making household products like ours. We wanted absolutely no part of it, but try explaining that to the testing labs and the product safety technicians who’d never known another way. It wasn’t easy! Nor was it a simple matter in those early days to come up with alternative means to test our products without innocent animals. Yet there was never any question that it simply had to be done. As a company, we have always believed strongly that animals are sentient beings whose rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are every bit the equal of our own. Our relationships with the animals who share our lives taught us long ago that animals feel pain, experience emotions, and have inner and outer lives that must be respected and protected. And we’ll go out of business before we subject even a single one to imprisonment, cruelty, or worse.

Instead, we use a series of in-vitro (literally “in glass”) tests. Simply put, we test on test tubes, not on animals. In addition to these tests, we double-check our most sensitive products, our baby wipe formula and hand dish liquid, in doctor-supervised clinical tests with human volunteers. These safety checks are called Human Repeat Insult Patch Tests (HRIPT). These tests are used only after we have demonstrated the safety of a product using the in-vitro tests. As we said, it isn’t easy, but we make it work in order to make ours a cruelty-free world.

It’s an honor to be acknowledged for our efforts, and we thank PETA for doing just that. If you’d like to learn more about animal testing and find out which companies are part of the problem and which are part of the solution, visit CaringConsumer.com.