The National Institutes of Health has officially shut down its final in-house beagle research program involving painful procedures, ending the federal government’s largest dog lab, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya confirmed Sunday.
The closure marks the termination of a longstanding research project on stress- and sepsis-induced cardiomyopathy at the NIH Clinical Center, which included experiments categorized under the USDA’s most severe pain classifications, D and E. In a televised interview, Bhattacharya stated, “We got rid of all of the beagle experiments on NIH campus.”
Jay Bhattacharya Closes NIH’s Last Beagle Lab
The National Institutes of Health has closed the last remaining intramural beagle lab conducting painful experiments — the federal government’s largest dog lab — NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya said in a television interview Sunday.
A project at the NIH Clinical Center on “stress-induced and sepsis-induced cardiomyopathy” represented the final in-house experiments that induced pain and distress in beagles, classified under U.S. Department of Agriculture pain categories D and E. The project has now been terminated.
“We got rid of all of the beagle experiments on NIH campus,” Bhattacharya said on Fox & Friends Weekend.
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“It’s very easy, for instance, to cure Alzheimer’s in mice. But those things don’t translate to humans,” Bhattacharya said. “So we put forward a policy to replace animals in research with technological advances, AI and other tools, that actually translate better to human health.”(RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Email Exposes How Boss Of NIH-Funded Alzheimer’s ‘Amyloid Mafia’ Shakes Down Critics)
NIH confirmed the news in a post on X.
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The NIH has killed 2,133 beagles in septic shock experiments since 1986, according to a nine-year investigation and advocacy campaign by White Coat Waste Project. Necroposy reports from 41 beagles and other veterinary records obtained by the group through the Freedom of Information Act show that the experiments involved infecting the beagles’ lungs with pneumonia-causing bacteria to induce sepsis and sometimes bleeding them out to induce hemorrhagic shock. The dogs are then euthanized.
Beagles have been used in medical experiments because of their docile temperament. The issue garnered the attention of many on social media and in Congress in 2021 when White Coat Waste revealed evidence that NIH exported $375,800 to a Tunisian lab for experiments that induced sand flies to feed on beagles locked in cages in order to study leishmaniasis. White House Chief Medical Advisor and longtime NIH official Anthony Fauci was flooded with phone calls.
“As the watchdog that first uncovered and battled Dr. Fauci’s beagle tests (the biggest animal testing scandal in history), we’re proud that White Coat Waste has closed the NIH’s last in-house beagle laboratory—and the US government’s biggest dog lab,” said White Coat Waste Project Founder Anthony Bellotti in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We applaud the President for cutting this wasteful NIH spending and will keep fighting until we defund all dog labs at home and abroad.”
NIH sourced beagles from contractor Envigo. Envigo reached a plea agreement in June 2024 to pay a $11 million fine for violating the Animal Welfare Act as part of a larger $35.5 million settlement, the largest-ever fine in an Animal Welfare Act case, according to the US Attorney’s Office. Inspections of a Virginia breeding facility revealed the dogs were stuffed in overcrowded kennels filled with feces and fed non-potable drinking water and rotten food.
The NIH announced on April 29 an initiative to shift away from animal experimentation toward less cruel methods more directly relevant to human health such as organoids, organs-on-a-chip, computing modeling and real-world data.
NIH made several commitments as a part of that effort, including establishing the Office of Research Innovation, Validation, and Application within Bhattacharya’s office to help scale non-animal approaches; publishing annual data on the reduction in funding for animal studies; offering more training in non-animal approaches and integrating that expertise into the study sections that make determinations about NIH extramural grants.
As recently as April 15, a longtime NIH official had defended the beagle experiments, saying that “current canine models of sepsis offer several advantages in research, including similar cardiovascular anatomy and the ability to induce sepsis through mechanisms that mimic what occurs in humans,” according to an email from NIH to congressional aides shared with the DCNF.
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