A new national poll by Pew Research shows that Americans’ opposition to animal testing is at an all-time high—52 percent. And most of the growth in opposition is coming from, believe it or not, the GOP: Republican opposition has increased by half in less than a decade, and now stands at 48 percent.
One of the practical responses to this shift is in public sentiment is a movement focused on enlisting Republicans to pay special attention to the abuse of animals in federally-funded labs.
The National Institutes of Health alone spends an estimated $15 billion annually on animal testing, roughly half of its entire research budget. At the same time, NIH awardees report that 87.5 percent of biomedical research—especially animal testing—is wasteful. The NIH states that 90 percent of drugs and medical treatments that pass animal tests fail in people because they are ineffective or toxic.
The private sector doesn’t tolerate this kind of waste. It funds only half as much animal testing as the federal government and is responsible for most of the innovation. According to Harvard professor and American Enterprise Institute visiting scholar Dr. Thomas Stossell, “More than 80 percent of new drug approvals originate from work solely performed in private companies.” Clearly, industry is a better judge of what is worthwhile research than Big Government. Industry and private philanthropists have also been a driving force behind technological innovations that supersede wasteful animal tests.
So if animal testing is primarily a government spending problem, it’s only natural for Republican lawmakers to cut the waste and save animals. And they’re doing just that.
For the second year in a row, President Trump has signed legislation restricting and de-funding invasive and deadly dog testing at the Department of Veterans Affairs. The effort was spearheaded by Freedom Caucus member Representative Dave Brat after veterans at his local VA hospital and national veterans’ groups criticized the VA’s outdated and unproductive dog testing, including giving puppies heart attacks and making them run on treadmills to stress their impaired hearts. Brat’s PUPPERS Act is a bipartisan bill that has support from 86 cosponsors and would defund these experiments permanently.
Dogs aren’t the only pets that Uncle Sam’s putting under the knife. For decades, a secretive U.S. Department of Agriculture program has been breeding as many as 100 kittens a year, forcing them to eat parasite-infested raw meat, scooping their litter boxes to harvest parasites in their stool, and then killing and incinerating the healthy and adoptable kittens before they’re three-months-old. These kittens are being used as a feces factory and then disposed of like trash at taxpayers’ expense. To date, over 3,000 kittens have been killed and $22 million squandered on this outdated research. Congressman Mike Bishop just threatened to “choke off their funding” if the USDA doesn’t voluntarily end the project, and has introduced the KITTEN Act to do it.
Earlier this year, the Food and Drug Administration announced that it was canceling multi-million-dollar nicotine addiction tests on monkeys and sending the surviving animals to a sanctuary following an investigation by White Coat Waste Project and criticism from Representatives Ken Calvert and Matt Gaetz and Senator Jeff Flake.
Following the example set by the FDA, Congressman Erik Paulsen is leading a new bipartisan initiative to retire dogs, cats, and monkeys no longer needed in experiments at federal labs, instead of them being needlessly killed like the kittens at the USDA.
And, as I previously wrote, the Environmental Protection Agency is spending untold millions forcing small animals to eat lard and then breathe diesel exhaust, ozone and smog for misguided experiments on the supposed effects of air pollution on people. Leading EPA critic Congressman Matt Gaetz united a bipartisan group of lawmakers to reform this program, calling the testing “horrific and inhumane” and giving a fiery floor speech in which he deemed the tests “a new low” for the agency.
Like most Americans, I don’t want my tax dollars paying for unnecessary research that tortures kittens and puppies. Kudos to the fiscally-responsible, animal-loving GOP lawmakers who are stepping up to stop wasteful taxpayer-funded animal testing.
