President Trump: ‘NIH Doesn’t Give a Rat’s A** About Wasted!’

PETA Ads Call On the Administration, Congress to Cut $15 Billion and End Useless Animal Experiments

For Immediate Release:
March 27, 2019

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

D.C. residents and Hill staffers who open The Hill and The Washington Times on Wednesday will see a message from PETA about waste and cruelty at the country’s premiere health agency, the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

“Forty-seven percent—$15 billion—of NIH’s budget is wasted on cruel experiments that fail to produce cures and treatments for humans,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “Congress and this administration can better use billions of dollars a year by diverting funds from tests in which animals are burned, poisoned, and crippled into superior, effective animal-free research.”

Studies have shown that 90 percent of animal studies don’t result in therapies for humans and that, in many cases, such experiments undermine efforts to develop cures for cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases. Ninety-five percent of new medications that test safe and effective in animals fail in human clinical trials. NIH has acknowledged the failure of experiments on animals to produce human-relevant results, stating in its most recent five-year plan that “animal models often fail to provide good ways to mimic disease or predict how drugs will work in humans, resulting in much wasted time and money while patients wait for therapies.”

PETA notes that some of the irrelevant “research” subsidized by NIH includes injecting hamsters with cocaine and forcing them to fight, puncturing mice’s intestines so that bacteria leak into their abdominal cavities and cause septic shock, and purposely breeding dogs to develop crippling canine muscular dystrophy. PETA recommends redirecting funds from experiments like these into superior, non-animal research methods that benefit humans.

Last Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, PETA hired a mobile billboard company to circle Mar-a-Lago in Florida, where the president stayed for the weekend, with the rat billboard.

Photos of the ads are also available here and here.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on—opposes speciesism, which is a supremacist worldview.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.

Note: PETA supports animal rights and opposes all forms of animal exploitation and educates the public on those issues. PETA does not directly or indirectly participate or intervene in any political campaign in support of or in opposition to any candidate for public office or any political party.