Many investors want to ensure they put their money in companies that share their values or, at a minimum, don’t conduct activities that are against their values. Analyzing companies for investment return is relatively straightforward, with various objective measures to consider: past returns, dividend rate, price to earnings ratio, etc. But ensuring companies are aligned with your values isn’t as straightforward.
How can you determine what investments to avoid if you want to make the world a better place? This is an extremely complex question, and one that is inherently subjective. How do you compare a company that produces and promotes cigarettes to one that torments and slaughters hundreds of millions of animals? How would you rank a company that releases toxic sludge in rivers versus a company that boils macaque monkeys alive? (Charles River Labs, one of the companies on our Ten Worst list below, does this.)
All of us here at Cruelty Free Investing want to avoid investing in companies that exploit animals. When it comes to listing the ten worst companies, we have chosen those we would be most embarrassed to be associated with, because of the magnitude of the suffering they cause. Your personal list may differ, of course. Our list will give you a sense of our top-line values, which we align with our own personal investing.
Each of the links below takes you to an explanation of how each company uses and exploits animals.
The list is in alphabetical order:
