Hegseth Called Upon to Sink Navy’s ‘Sinful’ Experiments on Animals
For Immediate Release:
September 29, 2026
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
What would Jesus do, Secretary Hegseth?
PETA’s full-page ad in today’s Washington Times calls on Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and U.S. Navy leadership to notice that the U.S. squanders millions of dollars on cruel and ‘sinful’ decompression-sickness and oxygen-toxicity experiments on pigs while ignoring superior, non-animal human-relevant research methods.
The ad comes as more than 100 Navy veterans and nearly 100,000 PETA supporters have written Secretary Hegseth urging top military brass to step in and end these cruel experiments in favor of state-of-the-art, non-animal research.
“These ungodly experiments are wasting millions of dollars, failing American sailors, and inflicting paralysis, hemorrhaging, and excruciatingly painful deaths on animal victims,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA calls on Secretary Hegseth and Navy leadership to transition to human-relevant research methods that could actually benefit humans while leaving animals in peace.”
For an incredible nine decades, the U.S. Navy has funded experiments at home and abroad that force pigs and other animals into simulated deep dives, causing them to suffer decompression sickness with gas embolisms, painful blood vessel blockages, paralysis, hemorrhaging, and causing them to suffer decompression sickness, commonly referred to as ‘the bends,’ which can cause gas embolisms, painful blood vessel blockages, paralysis, hemorrhaging, and death—while producing no meaningful change in core treatments for divers.
French and U.K. navies scrapped similar programs, and the Naval Medical Research Center has acknowledged that results from these experiments on animals don’t translate to the human experience.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on or abuse in any other way”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.
