DAILY TRIFECTA: Trump's Puppy Rescue
And he's cool for cats,too
THE SET-UP: “PETA thanks Trump.”
I'll bet that’s a three-word phrase you didn’t have on your 2025 bingo card. But there it is, emblazoned in this headline from conservative news channel OAN:
PETA thanks Trump admin for ending Navy experiments on cats and dogs, calls for broader ban
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) specifically thanked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Navy Secretary John Phelan for terminating deadly experiments on cats and dogs. It was a notable win for animal rights campaigners who, it seems, have found a surprising streak of likemindedness running through Trump’s Administration. Although, it’s less surprising when you trace it back to the incredible unpopularity of Dr. Anthony Fauci. Back when MAGA nation turned on him, it wasn’t long before he was linked to puppy-killing experimentation. That story went viral in the Right Wing’s media ecosphere and quickly turned into full-blown cause.
That transformation from, it seemed, opportunistic attack to actual concern for an issue associated with the likes of PETA, itself a favorite target of the Right, underscored a much larger trend that is largely non-partisan. People love animals. They love the animals they live with as members of their families. And they love to watch animals behave in ways that reveal their intelligence, their emotions and their undeniable sentience.
It’s a phenomenon I noted nearly ten years ago in a piece for Truthout. It’s only accelerated since then as Instagram and YouTube have turned into libraries filled with examples of what science long dismissed as “anthropomorphism.” Armed with the fallacies of Rene Descartes, scientists viewed animals as soulless automatons, bereft of true consciousness or a hint of sentience. That, in turn, made it incredibly easy to torture and maim them “for science.”
Then came Jane Goodall and her groundbreaking fieldwork.
She revolutionized how science sees the non-human animal world. It took a while, though, for science to catch-up with her. Over the last twenty-plus years, however, the admonition against anthropomorphism has given way to a vast array of inquiries into the minds of corvids and octopuses and chickens and bees. It’s science at its best. And the tidal change in that direction—which, I submit, has worked synergistically with evolving public attitudes towards animal—has made cruel and unusual Cartesian-based science increasingly harder to justify. We are starting to see animals as subjects, not objects. It hasn’t shut down factory farms … yet. But these experiments are a step in the Right direction. Yes, pun intended. - jp
TITLE: The one thing the Trump administration got very right
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/417127/trump-nih-harvard-defunding-monkey-research-livingstone
EXCERPTS: If there’s anything the Trump administration has gotten unequivocally right, it’s this: modern science, for all its remarkable capabilities, still remains far too dependent on one of the most primitive research methods there is — harming and killing animals.
That was the message underlying a groundbreaking initiative unveiled in April by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the chief funder of university biomedical research in the US. The agency promised to reallocate funding away from animal experimentation and toward cutting-edge alternatives, with the aim of pushing American science toward a more technologically advanced, less bloody future.
While the NIH’s initiative is, to my knowledge, being run by people genuinely invested in improving science by advancing animal-free methods, that mission is unfolding within an administration whose broader science policy has consisted mostly of laying waste to research funding across the board and attempting to destroy some of the country’s top research universities. These are objectives that one generally wouldn’t expect to be conducive to the flourishing of research on animal testing alternatives — or on any other topic.
It was in this contradictory context that the NIH last month announced it had defunded a set of controversial studies on baby monkeys run by Harvard Medical School neuroscientist Margaret Livingstone.
To study the development of vision, Livingstone’s lab separates newborn rhesus macaques from their mothers and then uses various techniques to manipulate their vision while they’re growing up — in the most disturbing case in 2016, two baby monkeys had their eyelids sewn shut for their first year of life.
The animals’ skulls are later surgically opened, electrodes are implanted into their brains, and researchers show them visual stimuli (images of faces, for example) to examine how the sensory deprivation or other visual manipulations affected their neurodevelopment.
From an animal ethics perspective, the defunding of Livingstone’s monkey research looks as close as it gets to an unambiguous win.
Today’s lab macaques are still generally housed in small metal cages — the size of telephone booths, as neuroscientist Garet Lahvis has put it for Vox — inside windowless rooms with little opportunity for free movement. They often show signs of psychological distress, engaging in strange, self-harming behaviors. Many of them, born in captivity, have never seen the outdoors.
Beyond the undeniable ethical issues, some scientists have called into question whether experiments on monkeys driven insane by extreme confinement and social deprivation can even produce knowledge transferable to humans.
Livingstone’s experiments in particular have provoked a storm of condemnation, not just from groups like PETA, which has campaigned to get her research shut down, but also from fellow scientists. In 2022, over 250 primatologists, animal behaviorists, and other academics, appalled by Livingstone’s separation of macaque mothers from their newborns — which is known to cause intense distress in both animals and abnormal social and cognitive development in the infants — signed a letter urging the retraction of one of her articles from the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Even Livingstone’s Harvard colleagues at the university’s Animal Law and Policy Clinic called on the NIH to defund her research.
The Livingstone lab’s work constitutes what’s known in the scientific community as “basic science” — research whose purpose is to advance our knowledge of how the world works in general, without necessarily having a direct medical application. “These are not experiments designed to develop a new treatment or cure for humans. These are not experiments that are ever going to develop a new treatment,” Katherine Roe, a neuroscientist and the chief scientist for PETA’s laboratory investigations department, told me. “They’re curiosity-driven.”
Of course, exploratory basic science research can lay the foundation for practical applications in the future, and federal funding certainly ought to have a role in funding it. Basic science involving invasive experimentation on animals derives its social license to operate, at least in theory, from its ability to articulate concrete benefits to humans — Livingstone, for example, has argued that her work on monkeys offers insights into the organization of the brain that could prove useful in helping people with autism or other conditions.
The problem is that these benefits are highly theoretical, and hardly begin to make up for either the ethical problems of experimenting on animals or the scientific problems of treating them as viable proxies for humans. As Lahvis, who used to study mice, argued in Vox in 2023, the same cramped, psychologically damaging conditions that make animal research ethically problematic can also undermine its translatability to humans.
This research carries on not because anyone is doing a rational weighing of its costs and benefits, but because in the eyes of the law and of biomedical science, animals are morally invisible and thoroughly disposable.
Harvard is now suing the administration to restore its science funding, and the indiscriminate, politically motivated nature of the cuts will be harder for Trump officials to defend than if the NIH had simply made narrowly targeted reductions to animal studies.
For animal advocates, this moment poses an exceptionally hard challenge: advocating intelligently for a transition away from animal research, and holding the Trump administration accountable for its promises, without allowing themselves to be recruited into a nihilistic war on universities. But scientists, too, ought to be honest with themselves about why the cruelty of animal experimentation has been so effectively weaponized for anti-science populism.
TITLE: Trump’s DOD Draws Down Deadly Dog and Cat Lab
https://amgreatness.com/2025/06/17/trumps-dod-draws-down-deadly-dog-and-cat-labs/
EXCERPTS: In a major win for taxpayers and pet owners, Donald Trump’s Department of Defense (DOD) is Making America Greater for Animals by flushing multimillion-dollar cat constipation experiments—and other disturbing tests on pets in the US and China—thanks to a campaign led by White Coat Waste (WCW).
Last week, during testimony at a Senate hearing on the Pentagon budget, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked to provide an example of wasteful spending he uncovered at his agency. His shocking response went viral: “We’re talking about some stuff I shouldn’t say in public, you know, marbles in the rear ends of cats, tens of millions of dollars.” Hegseth said this cat experiment was a “boondoggle” and that he was “proud to get rid of it.”
It’s been a long road, but WCW built an unprecedented, strange-bedfellows coalition and led the only campaign this century to specifically terminate the Pentagon’s dog and cat experiments—government abuse that liberal legacy animal groups ignored for decades.
WCW started its investigation into these cat experiments in 2022 and in 2023 sued the DOD for records related to the project.
The documents our lawsuit pried free in 2024 showed that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and U.S. Navy were paying a laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh to attach electrodes to cats’ spinal cords, insert inflated condoms into the cats’ colons, and shove marbles into their rectums. Then they forced the cats to defecate the foreign objects via electric shock for constipation experiments and performed related tests on the cats to purportedly study incontinence and erectile dysfunction.
In June 2024, sparked by WCW’s investigation, grassroots firepower, and lobbying, the House passed a bipartisan amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, cutting funding for the Pentagon’s pet abuse. It marked the first-ever vote to defund DOD dog and cat tests. Despite WCW building a diverse coalition with support from Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA), military veterans, and others, the Democrat-led Senate did not include the measure in their version of the bill, and the language didn’t make it to the president’s desk.
But Sen. Rand Paul soldiered on with WCW and included the DOD’s cat constipation experiments as a prime example of government waste in his December 2024 Festivus report, sparking widespread media coverage of the taxpayer-funded kitten killing.
WCW’s top priority for the new Trump Administration has been the defunding of dog and cat labs, and we hit the ground running early this year with support from MAGA allies like Lara Trump and Roger Stone. WCW also joined forces with Ben & Jerry’s progressive co-founder. Together, they urged the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cut Pentagon waste, including the cat constipation experiments.
WCW’s ongoing investigation then uncovered that the DOD had extended the grant for the cat lab and we launched an effort with Laura Loomer to finally terminate the DOD’s constipation experiments and other kitten and puppy abuse.
Enter Elon Musk, who joined the chorus of disapproval and posted in response to WCW and Loomer’s cat lab investigation that “@DOGE will investigate” and he, “will ask @DOGE to put an end to animal cruelty.”
Two weeks later, an official DOD account on X quoted our story and posted, “This is canceled. All waste at DOD is being removed.”
Fast forward ten days, Trump’s Navy Secretary John Phelan posted a video on X announcing a Navy-wide ban on all dog and cat testing and his spokesperson specifically credited WCW for the policy change. Lawmakers, including Senate DOGE Chair Joni Ernst and Reps. Young Kim (R-CA), Dina Titus (D-NV), and Mike Lawler (R-NY) took a victory lap and cited their work with WCW on the issue.
Days later, the Trump Administration terminated another contract funded by the DOD and National Institutes of Health that funded the cruel drugging of 300 “cute” beagles per week in a Chinese lab—another project first uncovered by WCW and that we’ve been fighting to end with the help of Donald Trump, Jr. and others.
Last week, Sec. Hegseth told Rep. Mace during a House Armed Services hearing that even more cuts to wasteful dog and cat labs uncovered by WCW may be coming.
TITLE: NIH planned to keep testing on beagles through 2026 before halting experiments
https://wjla.com/features/i-team/nih-animal-experimentation-tests-dogs-beagles-national-institutes-of-health-bethesda-maryland-facilty-hhs-us-department-of-health-and-human-services-navy-cats-white-coat-waste-project
EXCERPTS: Earlier this month, the U.S. Navy shut down all experiments on cats and dogs.
Days before the National Institute of Health (NIH) shut down its last beagle experiment.
That specific research killed five dogs. It all comes after years of public and congressional pressure to find alternatives to animal experiments.
7News has discovered the NIH was recently planning on continuing those experiments through 2026, which would have meant another 19 beagles dead.
Internal documents from the National Institutes of Health show U.S. taxpayers paid more than $15,000 in 2024 for five beagles who were experimented on to learn more about septic shock at a research facility in Bethesda, Maryland.
All five 14-month-old beagles died.
That experiment shut down in early May, but 7News is learning much more about how many beagles were on schedule to be killed and how those animals were treated.
All in the name of science.
White Coat Waste Project, a DC-based taxpayers' watchdog group, obtained the exclusive records through a Freedom of Information Act request and shared them with the I-Team.
As recently as April 15th, NIH told Congressional leaders the beagle research was ongoing, and NIH called the experiments painful.
Multiple vein catheters were implanted, and throats were cut to embed trach tubes.
NIH has been doing experiments like these on beagles for decades.
It says current canine models offer the ability to induce septic shock that mimics what occurs in humans.
Earlier this month, after nine years of pressure from the public, the White Coat Waste Project, and lawmakers, the federal government confirmed with 7News that the beagle experiments are now shut down.
Documents show NIH planned on using more of your tax dollars to fund the experiment through August 2026. If allowed to continue, it would have cost the lives of 24 beagles.
"What did we get for taxpayers and pet owners here? 40 years and a grand total of zero cures at the septic shock lab. What type of ROI is that? What type of return on investment is that?” says Anthony Bellotti, President and Founder of The White Coat Waste Project.
The NIH and the Navy join a growing list that includes the USDA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which are no longer doing experiments on cats or dogs at research facilities.
After the story aired on WJLA TV, the Americans for Medical Progress reached [out] to 7 News. We provided AMP with some of the same questions we asked other organizations that support animal research. AMP responded with the following answers:
Why did NIH use beagles for experiments? What were they studying?
Beagles, like other animal models, are sometimes used in research because of their size, temperament, and biological similarities to humans.
Did it ever produce valuable/lifesaving results?
It's important to remember that basic science research is essential because it uncovers foundational mechanisms of how a disease affects the body or how certain processes work in the body. We need this research to pave the way for clinical breakthroughs, but sometimes this can take many years.
Emerging technologies like AI and organ-on-a-chip systems are incredibly exciting, and AMP is a strong advocate for advancing them. But at this stage, they don’t replace the complexity of a whole living organism. For example, the way a drug behaves in the bloodstream, interacts with different organs, or triggers an immune response can’t yet be fully replicated in a dish or on a computer. At least not yet--we still need a full-body system to understand how things are working and make sure these therapies and drugs are safe. It’s not about choosing one model over the other — it’s about using the right tool for the right question. An integrative, complementary approach is how we ensure research is both ethical and effective.
What does AMP think about the recent successful work of citizens, federal lawmakers and organizations that have halted animal research at USDA, NIH and Dept of Veterans Affairs?
Public engagement and accountability are critical in science, and we respect the role of lawmakers and advocates. However, we are concerned that some of these decisions are being made based on optics or pressure campaigns rather than on what’s truly needed to responsibly advance medical knowledge. Scientific progress doesn’t happen in a vacuum. If we prematurely cut off certain types of research without having equally robust alternatives ready, we risk slowing down the development of lifesaving treatments. The goal should be to improve the system — not dismantle it.