ANIMAL CRUELTY: New Report Reveals the Federal Government Is Spending Millions To Get Animals High

Research indicates that the federal government is actually responsible for the vast majority of animal cruelty in the country.

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.

A Perennial Problem

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.

These revelations are chilling. But they really won’t surprise anyone who is even vaguely familar with the practices of our government.

While our Founders intended the US to be a bastion of human rights and ethics, decades of rampant spending with little accountability have spawned a sprawling federal system that is anything but this. We see this leviathon bombing innocent civilians in other countries, persecuting journalists and whistleblowers who tell the truth about the government’s actions, and condemning thousands of innocent Americans to life behind bars for nonviolent offenses. Is it any wonder they also do not value the lives of animals? Hardly.

There’s a cruel irony here, too. While the government locks American citizens in jail for cannabis use with its right hand, it’s turning around and drugging animals with the same product with its left.

As economist Ludwig von Mises once said, “The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments.”

This report is yet further proof of what many in the libertarian camp have long known: government is the real source of most of the evil in this world. But unlike when individuals do something wrong, there is little to no accountability for government actors when they carry out actions that would land the rest of us in jail.

AUTHOR

Hannah Cox

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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