Thanks to a generous in-kind ad grant from the PVBLIC Foundation, to coincide with tax week, White Coat Waste Project (WCW) has launched a national ad campaign calling on the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to stop forcing Americans to pay for its cruel and wasteful heart attack studies and other experiments on dogs.
As reported in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Washington Examiner, the first ad in the series went up this morning–a billboard in Cleveland, Ohio near the Stokes Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC). Stokes is one of only four VA facilities in the U.S. still experimenting on dogs.
Polls show that 75 percent of voters want the government to phase-out cruel dog experiments, but Stokes VAMC has been ramping up the practice. Stokes has not experimented on dogs in recent years, but we’ve uncovered that’s now changed.
Government records analyzed by WCW show that over the past year, the facility has spent thousands of taxpayers’ dollars buying dogs to torment in experiments. Recent VA purchases of mixed-breed dogs from laboratory suppliers show that your tax money was spent on:
- “Three female mongrels” for $4,299 in March 2016
- “Three Mongrels” for $3,696 in April 2016
- “Three Male Mongrels” for $4,207 in May 2016
- “Four Mongrels For Animals In Research” for $7,448 in January 2017
- “Five Mongrels For Research” for $5,800 in March 2017
As we’ve previously documented, it is difficult–even impossible, in some cases–for the taxpayers funding these experiments to find out what the VA is doing to dogs.
In the coming weeks, ads will go up in Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and near the Richmond VAMC where WCW has exposed rampant dog abuse, sloppy heart failure experiments and accountability failures that are now being investigated by the VA Inspector General.