The move was praised by outside groups.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has ended experiments on beagles, the agency’s director said on May 4.
“We got rid of all of the beagle experiments on the NIH campus,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the NIH, said on Fox News.
The NIH said on social media platform X that the move was part of the agency’s new initiative to reduce animal use in research.
The announcement means the NIH no longer has any in-house dog labs, according to the White Coat Waste Project, which has been tracking the agency’s dog experiments for years.
The tests on beagles at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, have been taking place since at least 1986 and have resulted in the killing of thousands of dogs, according to the group. The testing involved giving the beagles pneumonia-causing bacteria and bleeding them out, forcing them into septic shock.
“Taxpayers and pet owners shouldn’t be forced to pay for the NIH’s beagle abuse, and now, following a White Coat Waste campaign, they won’t have to,” Anthony Bellotti, president and founder of the government watchdog, told The Epoch Times via email.
The group said it will keep working to end similar experiments that are funded with taxpayer money and conducted elsewhere.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which sued the NIH over the experiments, said its supporters have sent tens of thousands of emails to NIH officials urging the officials to end them.
“PETA welcomes the long-overdue news that NIH is canceling at least one of the appalling sepsis experiments that inflicted prolonged suffering on animals in federal and federally funded laboratories,” Dr. Emily Trunell, PETA’s director of science advancement and outreach, told The Epoch Times in an email.
“Since 2013, PETA has argued for the complete termination of these cruel and scientifically worthless experiments on ALL animals—and we will continue to fight until every last one is ended.”
Lawmakers from both parties had expressed concern over the beagle experiments. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) and Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) were among the lawmakers to cheer Bhattacharya’s announcement.
The NIH had recently announced a plan to use fewer animals in federally funded research, replacing them with organoids and other alternatives.
“It’s very easy, for instance, to cure Alzheimer’s in mice. But those things don’t translate to humans,” Bhattacharya said on Fox. “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.”
