(Bethany Blankley, The Center Square) A new report published by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., highlights more than $1 trillion worth of taxpayer money spent on projects that he argues wastes and abuses taxpayer money.
Tucked in the annual “Festivus report” are three programs funded by federal agencies using millions of taxpayer dollars to experiment on cats.
The details are explicit and gruesome.
The Department of Defense spent nearly $11 million on “Orwellian cat experiments” that have nothing to do with training the U.S. military or national defense.
“When George Orwell wrote 1984, he couldn’t have imagined the bizarre, dystopian reality we find ourselves in today where tax dollars are being spent to shock cats into having erections and defecating marbles. Yes, you read that correctly,” the report states.
Through the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), $10,851,439 of taxpayer dollars were allocated to the University of Pittsburgh to conduct “grotesque and extremely invasive experiments on cats.”
This involved slicing open the backs of male cats to expose their spinal cords and inserting electrodes to send electric shocks “to make cats have an erection.”
The cats were then subjected to “even more electric shocks, sometimes for up to 10 minutes at a time, before having their spinal cords severed to paralyze their lower bodies,” the report states. “And just for good measure, the shocks continued for another 10 minutes. All this, in the name of ‘science.’”
In another DARPA-funded experiment, balloons were inserted into the cats’ colons and marbles into their rectums “to force these poor animals to defecate the marbles via electric shock.”
“Nothing says ‘national defense’ quite like torturing cats to poop marbles,” the report notes. “If we can’t stop the government from shocking cats into defecating marbles, then what can we stop?”
The report also notes that under the direction of ex-COVID czar Anthony Fauci, since 2022, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the U.S. Department of Agriculture allocated $2.24 million in grants to Cornell University to conduct feline COVID experiments.
Through a University of Illinois NIAID subgrant, Cornell received $1.59 million over the past two years in addition to a $650,000 USDA grant, bringing the total to $2.24 million, the report notes.
The experiments led to the suffering and death of 30 cats, according to the records of the experiments, the report notes.
The experiments involved injecting healthy cats with COVID-19, observing them suffer and then killing them in groups of four. The cats were not given any type of vaccine or treatment but killed as early as two days after being injected and left isolated in cages.
NIAID funding for the program is slated to continue through 2025; the USDA’s through May 2026, the report notes.
“It’s a mystery as to why the U.S. government continues to fund these barbaric types of studies, especially when the knowledge gained is either useless to society or could be learned without torturing an animal,” the report states.
$1.5 million to torture primarily female kittens
The National Institutes of Health spent more than $1.5 million to torture primarily female kittens in an extreme example “of waste and cruelty,” the report found.
“If you learned that your money is being used to electro-shock young kittens, torturing them for hours on end, and to the point that they vomit, would you believe it?” the report asks.
“Since 2019, $1,513,299 worth of taxpayer money has been going to these medieval-type experiments,” it continued. “This is not some distant, dystopian future; it’s happening right now at the University of Pittsburgh, courtesy of a grant from the NIH.”
According to the report, primarily female kittens between 4 and 6 months old were strapped to a hydraulic table, spun 360 degrees, flashed with bright lights, injected with copper sulfate, had holes drilled into their skulls, to be “shocked, and abused without resistance.”
According to NIH, the purpose of the experiments is to study how different species, like cats and monkeys, respond to motion sickness. Understanding responses to the test “could have implications for human health, potentially aiding in the treatment of conditions like vertigo or helping us understand the effects of space travel on the human body,” the report states.
The report cites primary sources and includes photographs of the animals and diagrams of the machines used.
