Navy-Funded Cat and Dog Experiments Nixed! PETA Calls on Trump Admin to Take It a Step Further
PETA gave kudos to the Trump administration for its recent decision to ban Navy-funded experiments on dogs and cats, but we’re still pressing military officials to extend that ban to all animals and include every branch of the military.
We sent letters to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, thanking them for their recent move, but also urged the military brass to take further action.
Here’s why.
We obtained public records showing decompression-sickness experimenters at the Naval Medical Research Command sliced open baby pigs, implanted devices in them, and locked them in high-pressure chambers for up to eight days before killing them.
Experimenters also administered a drug to a pig, inducing a severe escalation in body temperature and muscle contractions before killing the animal. Potentially faulty sedatives may have prolonged the pig’s suffering. Another pig thrashed and suffered for up to four hours, apparently due to a negative reaction to a drug, and was killed.
A rat also suffocated to death after an equipment malfunction, and the experimenter failed to report the incident for 23 days.
We’re calling for officials to conduct a comprehensive audit of the Department of Defense (DOD) aimed at rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in cruel and useless animal experimentation.
PETA urges immediate action to:
- Ban the use of animals in Navy decompression sickness and oxygen toxicity tests
- Prohibit the use of dogs, cats, nonhuman primates, marine animals, and other animals currently permitted in Army weapon-wounding tests
- Ban the currently permitted DOD funding of tests on animals at foreign institutions. For instance, an experimenter in Canada at the University of Alberta has received nearly $430,000 from DOD to use dogs as “models” of a muscle wasting disease. In Australia, DOD paid a James Cook University experimenter $600,000 to burn rats’ bodies with scalding water and inflict “[u]ncontrolled hemorrhage.”
The Navy has wasted more than $5.1 million in federal funding since 2020 for decompression sickness and oxygen toxicity tests on thousands of animals at Duke University, the University of Maryland, Baltimore, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of South Florida.
What You Can Do
Please join with PETA and urge the Navy, DOD, and four universities to end deadly and pointless tests on animals in favor of superior, human-relevant, non-animal research methods.
Please also urge the Army and the DOD to ban killing animals in grisly weapon-wounding experiments.
