People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and other animal rights groups have found what some might consider an unlikely ally in President Donald Trump and his administration.
This week PETA penned a letter to “The Honorable Pete Hegseth,” the secretary of defense, specifically thanking “President Donald J. Trump” and Navy Secretary John Phelan for the branch’s ban on Navy-funded dog and cat experiments.
Phelan on Tuesday terminated all Department of the Navy testing on cats and dogs, saying it was “long overdue” when he announced the ban and signed the order on X.
However, PETA wants the Pentagon to go further. It asked for a “comprehensive audit” that would root out “waste, fraud, and abuse in cruel and outdated animal experimentation” in all the defense branches.
These, the letter stated, included banning the use of animals in decompression and oxygen toxicity tests, stopping the Army’s use of animals in weapon-wounding experiments, and disallowing defense funding of tests on animals at foreign institutions.
Specifically, PETA reported that the Navy has “wasted more than $5.1 million in federal funding since 2020 for decompression sickness and oxygen toxicity tests” at universities around the country, using pigs, rodents, and other animals.
While reviewing other branches, PETA obtained public records reportedly showing decompression sickness experiments at the Naval Medical Research Command sliced open baby pigs, implanted devices, and locked them in high-pressure chambers for up to eight days before killing them.
Said PETA Vice President Shalin Gala on the group’s website:
Pigs, rats, and other animals feel pain and fear just as dogs and cats do, and their torment in gruesome military experiments must end. 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…
The Army’s weapon-wounding tests on animals were banned during the Reagan administration, Fox News reported.
However, they were reintroduced in 2020 when the Army’s research arm issued a policy permitting the purchase of “dogs, cats, nonhuman primates, or marine mammals to inflict wounds upon using a weapon for the purpose of conducting medical research, development, testing, or evaluation.”
The Navy’s new ban is not the first animal welfare policy by the administration of the 47th president, who, unlike past POTUS’s, doesn’t have a White House dog or any pets.
As Breitbart News reported in April, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is also is rolling back animal testing.
The taxpayer watchdog White Coat Waste Project (WCW) — which has revealed cruel animal experiments conducted with taxpayer funds throughout the years and also advocated for the Navy ban — praised the EPA’s renewed effort.
Also, last month the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that the agency had closed the last laboratory that used beagles in what could only be called cruel experiments.
Such questionable dog testing surfaced during the wake of the COVID epidemic when lawmakers accused now former infectious disease director Anthony Fauci of funding an experiment that cut out the vocal cords of beagles, infested them with ticks, and locked their heads inside cages with infectious sandflies.
A report from WCW also detailed an extensive beagle experimentation history, which included killing thousands of the dogs for more than 40 years in experiments that often involved tortuous conditions.
One of these experiments reported by WCW included pumping pneumonia-causing bacteria in the lungs of more than 2,000 beagles, bleeding them out and forcing them into septic shock.
In March, WCW even thanked the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) when it took aim at animal testing, announcing the cancellation of several NIH grants geared towards transgender experiments on mice and rats.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
