How the Government Is
Perpetuating $12 Billion in Animal Cruelty
Kristie Eshelman on July 8, 2015
In summer of 1995, 17-year-old Anthony Bellotti accepted an internship at a
taxpayer-funded animal experimentation laboratory.
Before that summer, Anthony Bellotti had never really thought about animal
activism. But his internship experience led him to realize just how cruel, and
often unnecessary, government-funded animal testing was—and how American
taxpayers, like it or not, were unfairly being forced to subsidize most of it.
Bellotti told the Huffington Post:
You don’t support “socialized medicine,” why on earth would you support
socialized “medical research? And even if you support animal experimentation in
principle, do you really want to pay for it with higher taxes?
As the result of his summer internship, Bellotti decided to dedicate the
rest of his life fighting animal cruelty by targeting its source: wasteful
government spending. Two years ago, Bellotti founded the White Coat Waste Movement, an organization dedicated to challenging wasteful government spending as
the source of the majority of animal testing.
Generation Opportunity had a chance to sit down with Bellotti to better
understand the issue. Apparently, the government, through the National Health
Institute (NIH), spends between $12 billion and $14.5 billion tax dollars to
pay for wasteful and completely unnecessary animal experiments. That
doesn’t even include funding for experimentation through organizations like the
EPA, the USDA, and other agencies.
These are not the experiments driving the latest cutting-edge medical
discoveries; they are being done to satisfy academic interests. In fact, 47
percent of NIH grants go to benefit research projects at colleges and
universities. And each individual project costs millions.
Take the following examples:
- The recent economic “stimulus” spending program sent $144,541 in taxpayer dollars to Wake Forest University where researchers forcibly addicted monkeys to cocaine. The conclusion of the experiment was that cocaine was highly addictive and dangerous.
- The taxpayer-funded Oregon National Primate Research Center spent $9.5 million to force-feed monkeys fatty food and sugary drinks while they were shut into tiny cages. Researchers concluded from this endeavor that the monkeys would have benefitted from more activity and less rich food.
- Researchers at the Ohio State University spent $9 million to force beagles to run on treadmills to see how long it would take to induce heart attacks. For 20 years, this study reinforced the knowledge that exercise can be good for you—in moderation. Ohio State recently wrapped up its endeavors, but Wayne State University is continuing this line of research.
Government is using our generation’s money to provide these grants. We’re
providing the funding, but we’re not receiving any accountability for what
these experiments are actually accomplishing. In fact, there’s increasing
evidence that animal testing isn’t effective at all for creating new products
or solutions for humans.
Ex-NIH Director Elias Zerhouni said:
We have moved away from studying human disease in humans. It’s time we
stopped dancing around the problem…we need to refocus and adapt new
methodologies for use in humans to understand disease biology in humans.
Additionally, Federal Drug Administration (FDA) admitted that 92 to 96 percent of all the drugs tested successfully on animals
would fail on humans.
Contrast this with the private sector in the U.S., which, according to
Bellotti, spends a fraction of what the government spends per year in the
United States. He told Generation Opportunity:
[The private sector is] realizing that animal experimentation is slow,
ineffective, and expensive because beagles aren’t merely furry little people
who walk on all fours. It’s much more complicated than that. Testing a new drug
on a mouse is no guarantee that it’s going to be a safe OR effective drug for
humans. It actually leads to a lot of false positives and false
negatives. And when the private sector does engage in animal experimentation,
it’s usually because [it] is forced to because of an outdated 1930s-era
regulation. So [it often has] no choice but to comply.
New technologies and ways of testing drugs, treatments, and even makeup
have been permeating the private sector, causing it to move away from animal
testing as a means of research. The federal government,
in contrast, continues to use tax dollars to perpetuate a practice which is
both cruel and often ineffective. As Bellotti says:
If something is truly valuable, find your own money to do it.
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