PETA Praises Trump Admin for Nixing Navy-Funded Dog and Cat Tests, Calls for Broader DOD Ban
For Immediate Release:
May 29, 2025
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
In letters sent today to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, PETA thanks the Trump administration for its ban on Navy-funded dog and cat experiments announced this week, and urges a broader ban on all animal testing across all military branches.
PETA specifically calls for officials to conduct a comprehensive, agency-wide audit aimed at rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in cruel and outdated animal experimentation.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
- Disallow currently permitted Department of Defense (DOD) funding of tests on animals at foreign institutions
PETA obtained public records showing decompression sickness experimenters at the Naval Medical Research Command who sliced open baby pigs, implanted devices, 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. Also, a rat suffocated to death after an equipment malfunction, and the experimenter failed to report the incident for 23 days.
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.
This doomed animal in a hyperbaric chamber is one of the countless rats used in Navy-funded experiments that supposedly study oxygen toxicity in humans, despite that human-relevant, animal-free methods are widely available.
“Pigs, rats, and other animals feel pain and fear just as dogs and cats do, and their torment in gruesome military experiments must end,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA appreciates the Trump administration’s decision to stop the Navy’s torture tests on dogs and cats, and we urge a broader ban across the Pentagon to end the use of animals in Navy-funded decompression sickness and oxygen toxicity tests, Army-funded weapon-wounding tests, and DOD-funded foreign experiments.”
PETA swayed the Army in 2023 to end its $750,000 funding for a brain-damaging experiment on ferrets more than six months ahead of schedule, sparing animals from bombardment by a directed-energy weapon using radio waves supposedly studying Havana syndrome in humans.
In one experiment in Canada currently receiving $429,347 in DOD funding, University of Alberta experimenter Toshifumi Yokota uses dogs as “models” of a muscle wasting disease. In another ongoing DOD-funded foreign experiment in Australia receiving $599,984, James Cook University experimenter Geoffrey P. Dobson burns 30 percent of rats’ body surface with scalding water. Dobson also cuts into their livers, inflicting “[u]ncontrolled hemorrhage.”
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.
