Trump administration shuts down beagle experiment labs at NIH

Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), announced over the weekend the closure of the agency's final beagle dog experimentation lab.

The news broke just days after Elon Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), posted on X announcing an investigation into funding for canine experimentation.

The NIH confirmed the move on social media, saying it has enacted an "initiative to expand innovative, human-based science while reducing animal use in research, including eliminating all experiments on beagles on the NIH campus."

"It's very easy, for example, to cure Alzheimer's in mice. But those things cannot be applied to humans," Bhattacharya said Sunday during a Fox News interview.

Biggest animal testing scandal in history.

In 2021, the horrific puppy experiments conducted by former NIH member Dr. Anthony Fauci were revealed, sparking one of the largest animal experimentation scandals in U.S. history.

A multi-year investigation by the medical watchdog group White Coat Waste (WCW) uncovered that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) killed over 2,100 beagles in "brutal septic shock experiments" since 1986.

A WCW project report outlined the history of the lab, which allegedly introduced pneumonia-causing bacteria into the lungs of over 2,000 beagles, causing them to bleed out and forcing them into septic shock for lethal experiments.

"After four days of infection, the NIH kills the beagles and puts their bodies in a refrigerator," the document adds.

Thousands of beagles killed in horrific experiments.

In 2021, WCW also revealed that Fauci's NIH division funded an experiment at Kansas State University, where hundreds of ticks fed on canines injected with a mutant bacteria, according to Breitbart News.

The report confirmed that at least 28 beagle puppies were killed each year for this specific study, bringing the total number of deaths to between 126 and 138 dogs since it began in December 2007.

Another similar investigation revealed that Fauci's division "sent part of a $375,800 grant to a lab in Tunisia to drug beagles and enclose their heads in mesh cages filled with hungry sandflies so the insects could eat them alive."

The organization also reported that the puppies were confined alone in cages in the desert for nine consecutive nights, used as bait to attract infectious sandflies.

This is not the first cutback from the Trump administration regarding animal testing at other agencies. Animal rights group PETA, along with the FDA and EPA, has commended the president for "helping to save tens of thousands of animals every year."