OAN Staff Taylor Tinsley
8:17 AM – Tuesday, May 6, 2025
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has closed its last in-house beagle laboratory.
During an interview with Fox & Friends Sunday NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya said the agency got rid of all beagle experiments on the NIH campus.
Bhattacharya said he rolled out a new policy to look at alternatives to using animals for research.
“It’s very easy, for instance, to cure Alzheimer’s in mice but those things don’t translate to humans,” Bhattacharya explained. “So we’ve put forward a policy to replace animals in research with other technological advances – AI and other tools – that actually translate better to human health.”
Bhattacharya said he even received flowers from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) following the decision.
The NIH has funded beagle torture for more than 40 years.
These experiments included invasive procedures such as inducing septic shock and drug toxicity testing – all in the name of advancing medical research on the taxpayers dime.
A White Coat Waste Project exposé reported that then-NIAID Director Anthony Fauci spent over $424,000 on an experiment where dogs were bitten to death by flies.
The closure marks a shift amid public and political scrutiny. It also comes not long after Department of Government Efficiency head Elon Musk said he would investigate whether the funding of animal torture was still happening under the Trump Administration, in response to a podcast episode from political activist Laura Loomer.
The Trump Administration has made an effort to reduce government spending on animal testing. This includes aligning with the White Coat Waste Project to cut grants for research creating “transgender animals” and reinstating an EPA plan to phase out animal testing that was announced during Trump’s first presidency but abandoned under President Joe Biden.
In April, the FDA also announced it’d be phasing out animal testing requirements for certain drug development processes in favor of human relevant methods.
According to Humane World for Animals, formerly known as the U.S. Humane Society, an average of 44,000 dogs have been used in experiments across the nation every year over the last three years, in addition to tens of thousands of puppies bound for labs that are born in breeding facilities