The U.S. has announced harsh sanctions against Russia in response to Vladimir Putin’s belligerence in Ukraine.
But we have to ask…
Does that mean the National Institutes of Health will finally stop sending money to Russia for cruel kitten experiments?
Yes, you read that correctly: the U.S. has been sending money to Vladimir Putin’s state-run labs for monstrous experiments on kittens — and before you ask, these experiments did not take place a long time ago.
Cat experimenters at Russia’s Pavlov Institute of Physiology in St. Petersburg, Russia, received nearly $550,000 from the NIH in 2021 alone and another $220,000 back in 2018!
These experiments, recently unearthed by WCW researchers, are some of the worst we’ve ever seen — and that’s saying something.
Putin and Russian white coats look on with delight as U.S. tax dollars arrive in Moscow. Is this how you want your money spent?
This is what your tax dollars are paying for (after being converted into rubles, that is).
In one ghoulish experiment, 18 healthy cats were “decerebrated,” then forced to walk on a treadmill. “Decerebration” is a procedure in which experimenters cut off a cat’s brain function while they are still alive. The cats are knocked out and their brain stems are severed, and sometimes, pieces of their brain are even removed. The “zombie” cats then have electrodes implanted into their spines and are forced to walk on treadmills.
If that sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because these same experiments are done on kittens here at home, too.
Having to pay for these experiments in America is bad enough. So why does Uncle Sam want us to pay for these experiments in Russia, too?
We’ve uncovered that you’ve been paying this Russian lab to torture cats in experiments like this one since 2018 (see here and here).
Here’s a diagram from the experimenters:
Actual illustration of the Russian cat experiment.
WCW exposed how NIH shipped U.S. tax dollars to a Kremlin-run lab, where Russian white coats electrocute ‘zombie cats’ to make them move on treadmills.
Electrocuting zombie cats to make them move. Utterly horrifying. The fact that we’re paying for this? “Disgusting” doesn’t even begin to cover it.
WCW researchers also found experiments at the same Russian government lab — which, thankfully, American tax dollars did not fund — involving injecting chemicals into dogs’ brains, implanting electrodes in monkeys’ brains, and removing the brains from kittens as young as 4 days old.
We’ve said it before and we will say it again: the NIH is addicted to spending. As we revealed in our “Worldwide Waste” investigation, the NIH spent around $140 million on animal experiments in foreign countries in 2020. A total of 353 labs in 57 countries worldwide are authorized to receive U.S. taxpayer funds — including countries like China and Russia, which the U.S. government has called “foreign adversaries.”
It sure doesn’t make sense to us — or to a majority of American taxpayers. A recent poll by Lincoln Park Strategies found that nearly two-thirds of respondents supported a ban on funding animal experiments in countries the U.S. has deemed ‘adversaries.’
What DOES make sense is the WCW-backed AFAR Act, from Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI). This legislation would prohibit tax dollars from funding animal experiments in countries that have been deemed foreign adversaries by the U.S. government (read Rep. McClain’s press release).
