Your Tax Money Has Bankrolled Grisly Experiments on Rabbits and Cats—Stop It Now!
PETA has done some additional digging into the career of experimenter Tatiana Deliagina, who currently mangles the bodies of rabbits in Sweden on your dime, and found that her well of animal despair runs far deeper than we previously knew.
PETA was first to expose Deliagina’s grisly rabbit experiments, bankrolled by National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant money, at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute.
But tracing her published material back decades, PETA found Deliagina’s trail of animal tears reaches back to the early 1970s and includes grisly experiments on cats and a wide range of other animal victims. We also found that Deliagina made big promises about how humanely she’d treat the rabbits in her recent experiments, and kept none of them. And, according to a 2025 paper she coauthored, Deliagina’s current NIH grant has also funded experiments on cats.
The enormity of Deliagina’s pointless career and the federal money she bilked makes her a poster child for the worldwide network of animal butchery that NIH supports with your tax dollars, and reason No. 1 the U.S. Congress must pass the Cease Animal Research Grants Overseas (CARGO) Act, which would ban NIH from sending federal money to support experiments on animals.
Inglorious Career
Deliagina has tormented animals at various institutions in Russia, including Moscow State University and the Academy of Science of Russia, and collaborates with experimenters affiliated with the Pavlov Institute of Physiology in St. Petersburg.
Her experiments on cats in the early 1970s were similar to her current tests on rabbits: She removed part of cats’ brains, fixed the animals to “holders,” cut their backs, severed their spinal cords, implanted electrodes, and decapitated them.
She then tormented snails and lampreys and had a special way of tormenting rats. She cut out the organ responsible for their balance and spatial orientation and watched as they twisted and rolled and circled, their heads tilted and their eyes moving abnormally. She kept them alive like this for weeks.
Pants on Fire
Deliagina sought approval for her current experiments on rabbits from a local ethics committee, saying that one of the tests aimed to elicit a postural reflex would “involve low stress,” as if being confined and pinned on their backs during the test was not extremely stressful for the animals. She then describes cutting their backs open, making up to four incisions in the rabbits’ limbs to implant electrodes. The electrodes remain in the animals’ bodies for up to seven weeks. The rabbits will be intentionally debilitated, unable to keep the rear part of their bodies above ground for up to a week, and yet they will still be hobbled for up to four months. “We show great consideration for the animals’ well-being during the course of the experiment,” she said.
Deliagina also said the animals would be euthanized if they showed signs of declining health. “We place the utmost importance on caring for the rabbits and minimizing their impact and possible stress,” she said in her application.
That’s not true. PETA exposed that Deliagina’s rabbits were kept alive for up to 50 days after they should have been euthanized.
The ethics committee approved the experiments under the condition that the rabbits were “washed or dried daily” while they were unable to groom themselves. However, as PETA found, the sparse and spotty record-keeping indicates that this condition was not met.
It’s the rabbits’ “calm disposition” that makes them a preferred animal for experiments, Deliagina said. In other words, Deliagina repays the rabbits’ trusting and docile nature by drilling holes into their brains and spines.
What You Can Do
If you’re in the U.S., please TAKE ACTION and urge Congress to pass the Cease Animal Research Grants Overseas (CARGO) Act, which would end NIH funding of experiments on animals in foreign laboratories:
And anyone anywhere can urge NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to end funding for all foreign experiments on animals:
