450+ Veterans Want Sec. Hegseth to Sink Navy’s Deadly Decompression Tests on Animals

For Immediate Release:
November 10, 2026

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

In a letter sent today to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, more than 450 U.S. veterans will mark the upcoming Veterans Day by calling on Hegseth to end Navy funding for painful and irrelevant decompression sickness and oxygen toxicity experiments on animals exposed by PETA, and redirect the funds to superior, state-of-the-art research methods that offer real protection to service members.

The veterans urge a quick end to crude tests on sheep and other animals in favor of advanced simulators, computational models, organs-on-chips, and other human-relevant research methods. The Navy recently showed the value of animal-free innovation with its new DSEND diving suit, designed to reduce or potentially eliminate divers’ risk of decompression sickness.

The veterans’ appeal follows a recent letter signed by four members of Congress. It builds on earlier calls from more than 100 U.S. Navy veterans and more than 100,000 PETA supporters who have already urged the military branch to end the cruel and outdated experiments. PETA pressure also forced an end to Navy-funded tests on sheep conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Our Navy should be using the best science available, not wasting millions of dollars squeezing the life out of animals in archaic experiments that do nothing to protect service members,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA calls on Secretary Hegseth to heed the calls of hundreds of veterans and embrace what works, because giving sheep the bends does not.”

Credit: PETA

Recently, a Navy-funded Duke University experiment forced 40 pigs into diapers and heated diving suits and subjected them to simulated deep dives that left them suffering from decompression sickness, blood vessel blockages, paralysis, and hemorrhaging. All were killed at the end of the experiments. At the University of South Florida, more than half a million dollars in Navy funding went toward oxygen-toxicity experiments that caused rats to suffer seizures.

Since 2020, the Navy has spent more than $5.1 million on decompression sickness, commonly called “the bends,” and oxygen toxicity tests on thousands of animals at U.S. universities. These experiments fail to translate reliably to human outcomes due to major physiological differences between species.

Even the Naval Medical Research Center has acknowledged the shortcomings of decompression sickness experiments on animals, noting that “animal (decompression sickness) in many cases is more severe than that in humans.” Navies in France and the U.K. have already scrapped similar animal testing programs, making the U.S. Navy an outlier.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—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.