November 01, 2018 04:03 AM (Washington Examiner)

 The National Institutes of Health alone spends an estimated $15 billion annually on animal testing, roughly half of its entire research budget. At the same time, NIH awardees report that 87.5 percent of biomedical research—especially animal testing—is wasteful. **The NIH states that 90 percent of drugs and medical treatments that pass animal tests fail in people because they are ineffective or toxic. **

 **For the second year in a row, President Trump has signed legislation restricting and de-funding invasive and deadly dog testing** at the Department of Veterans Affairs. The effort was spearheaded by Freedom Caucus member Representative Dave Brat after veterans at his local VA hospital and national veterans’ groups criticized the VA’s outdated and unproductive dog testing, including giving puppies heart attacks and making them run on treadmills to stress their impaired hearts. Brat’s PUPPERS Act is a bipartisan bill that has support from 86 cosponsors and would defund these experiments permanently.

 Dogs aren’t the only pets that Uncle Sam’s putting under the knife. For decades, a secretive U.S. Department of Agriculture program has been breeding as many as 100 kittens a year, forcing them to eat parasite-infested raw meat, scooping their litter boxes to harvest parasites in their stool, and then killing and incinerating the healthy and adoptable kittens before they’re three-months-old. These kittens are being used as a feces factory and then disposed of like trash at taxpayers’ expense. To date, over 3,000 kittens have been killed and $22 million squandered on this outdated research. Congressman Mike Bishop just threatened to “choke off their funding” if the USDA doesn’t voluntarily end the project, and has introduced the KITTEN Act to do it. 

(read the entire story here https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/trump-and-republicans-stop-cruel-animal-testing)