Paying Canada to Strangle Mice: PETA Calls Out DOW-Funded Domestic Violence Experiments

For Immediate Release:
September 17, 2026

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

The Pentagon is paying a Canadian experimenter to strangle mice to near death and bash their heads, causing brain injury, under the guise of studying domestic abuse. Today, PETA sent a letter to Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering and Department of War Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael, urging him to stop wasting U.S. taxpayer dollars on all painful, pointless experiments on animals in Canada totaling more than $21 million.

The Department of War gave University of British Columbia experimenter Cheryl Wellington more than $5 million to squeeze the blood vessels in mice’s necks and airways to create what she calls a “nonfatal strangulation” model of intimate partner violence–related brain injury. Some mice are also subjected to head impact injuries.

In other Pentagon-funded studies, experimenters severely injure the spinal cords of pigs, rats, and mice; deafen and blind rats; and subject pigs to repeated blood transfusions. 

This mouse is one of many restrained in Wellington’s laboratory. The device’s air-powered metal piston rapidly strikes the animal’s skull, causing the head to whip backward and rotate. Wellington purportedly uses this method to model traumatic brain injury associated with self-described “intimate partner violence,” including procedures that compress animals’ neck blood vessels and airways in a crude attempt to replicate “nonfatal strangulation.” Subjecting mice to blunt-force and strangulation-like procedures cannot reproduce the complexities faced by human survivors of domestic violence, making the scientific relevance of these experiments highly questionable.

Credit: Modified from Figure 9 in Namjoshi DR, Good C, Cheng WH, et al. Merging pathology with biomechanics using CHIMERA (Closed-Head Impact Model of Engineered Rotational Acceleration): a novel, surgery-free model of traumatic brain injury. Molecular Neurodegeneration. 2014;9:55. CC BY 4.0 Deed | Attribution 4.0 International | Creative Commons.

“Domestic violence is a serious human issue, not an excuse to strangle animals,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA calls on the Pentagon to stop funding this and other horrific, useless experiments on animals in Canada and instead fund state-of-the-art, non-animal methods that can actually save service members’ lives.”

PETA encourages everyone to urge the Secretary of War to ban the Pentagon from funding foreign experiments on animals.

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 Kitsfor people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.