Last week, White Coat Waste Project launched a national ad campaign targeting the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) deadly, wasteful and secretive taxpayer-funded dog experiments with a billboard outside of the Cleveland VA. The ad campaign is supported in part by a generous in-kind grant from the PVBLIC Foundation.
Today, as reported in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, CBS 58 and Fox 6, the second billboard in the series went up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin near the Zablocki Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC). Zablocki is one of only four VA facilities in the U.S. still experimenting on dogs. It’s also the biggest.
According to federal records, Zablocki’s use of dogs in painful experiments increased nearly 300% from 2015 to 2016 (from 18 dogs to 52 dogs). It used no dogs at all in 2014.
Documents obtained by WCW via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show that in the current project at Zablocki VAMC, more than 150 beagle puppies will be sedated, restrained in stereotaxic devices, have their heads and necks dissected, their lungs intentionally collapsed, holes drilled into their skulls, their brains cut apart, and then killed. These are basic, curiosity-driven experiments without any application for veterans or other Americans.
Procurement documents obtained by WCW detail that on January 3, 2017, nine 6 to 8-month-old beagle puppies were delivered to Zablocki for these experiments.
Despite being funded since 2010, the federal research database has no funding information or results listed for Zablocki’s dog experimentation project.
Polls show that 75 percent of voters want the government to phase-out cruel dog experiments, but Zablocki VAMC is ramping up the practice.
In the coming weeks, ads will go up in 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.