With the approach of holiday travel, drivers nationwide are anticipating pain at the pump—but it will sting a bit more for some motorists in Madison, Wisconsin, where  gas stations in high-traffic areas are now displaying PETA ads with a shocking photo taken inside a University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW) laboratory in which dozens of cats were abused and killed as part of a continuing taxpayer-funded experiment.

Truth Will Out

The ads show a gentle tabby named Double Trouble restrained in a bag with a steel post screwed into her skull. It's just one of the photos that PETA obtained following a three-year legal battle against UW. They were taken by the experimenters as part of an appalling project in which cats also have steel coils implanted in their eyes and electrodes inserted into their brains, are starved for days at a time, and are intentionally deafened.

Following complaints by PETA and a former UW veterinarian, the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture are investigating apparent violations of federal animal welfare regulations and misuse of federal funding related to these horrible experiments. After UW officials fought for years to keep the photographic evidence of Double Trouble's wretched life and protracted death secret, PETA's ads are showing their friends and neighbors exactly how cats are tormented and killed behind the school's laboratory doors.

What You Can Do

Learn more about UW's shameful secrets, and please urge the federal government to stop funding this primitive and lethal experiment.

St. Louis drivers who stop to fill up their tanks will get an eyeful of Washington University in St. Louis' cruelty to cats. PETA has placed hard-hitting ads on top of the pumps at seven gas stations near the campus to show the university's students, faculty, and alumni that the school uses cats like most of us use cars—as equipment.

Instead of using modern human-patient simulators in the intubation training exercises it holds in conjunction with St. Louis Children's Hospital, trainees are asked to repeatedly force hard plastic tubes down cats' and ferrets' throats, causing their delicate windpipes to bleed, swell, and scar. Cats can even die as a result of the injuries sustained during this traumatic procedure.

© iStockphoto.com/Grigoriy Lukyanov

Drivers may pull into the gas stations lamenting "pain at the pump," but they'll leave disgusted by the pain that Washington University in St. Louis is inflicting on cats. And PETA added more fuel to the fire with similar ads in newspapers and online.

If the school wants to truly honor its namesake, George Washington, who had nine companion animals at the White House, it should call off the cruel cat laboratory and switch to the modern simulators already in use at nearly every other similar facility in the country.