With the Budget Control Act of 2011’s 7.8 percent cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on track to kick in at the start of 2013, PETA is urging Congress to take a more drastic measure—cut all funding for wasteful experiments on animals.
In a letter sent today to congressional leaders, PETA explains that nearly half of NIH’s current $30 billion annual research budget is awarded to projects that involve cruel experiments on animals, which do nothing to advance human health and which contribute to the country’s expanding deficit. These projects include cruel and costly experiments like these:
- The University of California–San Francisco receives more than $360,000 a year in federal largesse for erectile dysfunction experiments in which rats have their penises cut apart before being killed.
- Columbia University gets half a million dollars a year to addict female monkeys to crack and cocaine in order to see how their drug use is affected by their menstrual cycle.
- The University of Wisconsin–Madison receives more than $330,000 a year for a project in which chicken eggs are injected with pure alcohol to see how the exposure affects baby chicks.
- Oregon Health & Science University—which already bears responsibility for the infamous (and lethal) “gay sheep” experiments—collects more than $2 million a year for a project that includes examining whether the offspring of obese female monkeys are more frightened of Mr. Potato Head dolls than are children of non-obese mothers.
That last one is no joke …
… but it has a sick punch line: Because animal species differ from one another biologically in many significant ways, experiments on animals almost never produce results that can be applied to humans in a meaningful way.
What You Can Do
Please tell your representatives in Washington to stop wasting lives, money, and opportunities on cruel and ineffective experiments on animals.
