(Foundation for Economic Education) Animal rights groups like PETA raise millions of dollars per year and spend their time dumping fake blood on celebrities’ fur coats. Even more radical groups like the Animal Liberation Front set restaurants that sell meat on fire and torch research labs.
But a new report from the White Coat Waste Project (WCW), a free-market based animal rights group, indicates these organizations should probably be directing their fury at a much bigger culprit: the government.
That’s right. Research indicates that the federal government is actually responsible for the vast majority of animal cruelty in the country. According to WCW, the government spends millions of taxpayer dollars every year on animal laboratories that carry out unethical testing on animals through grants, contracts, and experiments within its own labs.
In a new report, Up In Smoke, WCW exposes even more of these corrupt practices. In particular, they detail millions of taxpayer dollars the government recently spent on cannabis and e-cigarette animal experiments—and rampant violations of federal spending transparency law that were committed in the process.
In one experiment, “pregnant mice were confined to a chamber, where they were forced to breathe e-cigarette vapor for hours.” According to the report, “After giving birth, their pups underwent behavioral tests, and were then killed and their brains analyzed. However, experimenters openly acknowledged significant differences between rodent brain development and human brain development.”
Another experiment forced mice to breath a variety of flavored e-cigarette vapors to “study the effects of vaping on the heart.” But notably, the authors said that “caution should be exercised when extrapolating the findings in the mouse heart to the human heart due to the presence of many obvious differences including those related to important species differences.”
So, in short, our government has been hotboxing mice for no apparent reason—they aren’t even producing research that could improve human health.
There are other problems detailed in the report as well. For instance, the Stevens Amendment is an old federal policy that requires public disclosure of taxpayer monies spent, yet WCW reports that not one experiment detailed in their report was in compliance with that law.
This is the second time in under a year that abusive animal testing by our government has come to light. Just a few months ago it was revealed that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) provided a grant to a lab in Tunisia to torture and kill beagle puppies for scientific experiments.
