Navy Secretary John C. Phelan announced on Tuesday that the department will be terminating all “testing on cats and dogs,” prompting critics to wonder why these tests were occurring in the first place.
“Today it gives me great pleasure to terminate all Department of the Navy’s testing on cats and dogs, saving taxpayer dollars and ending these inhumane studies,” Phelan said in a statement. “This is long overdue.”
“In addition to this termination, I’m directing the Surgeon General of the Navy to conduct a comprehensive review of all medical research programs to ensure they align with ethical guidelines, scientific necessity, and our core values of integrity and readiness,” he added.
Today it gives me great pleasure to terminate all Department of the Navy’s testing on cats and dogs, ending these inhumane practices and saving taxpayer dollars. This is long overdue. I commend @POTUS, @SecDef and @DOGE for bringing this to light. pic.twitter.com/joKRfuNbF4
— Secretary of the Navy John C. Phelan (@SECNAV) May 27, 2025
Responding to the statement on Twitter/X, a number of critics wondered why the Navy had been performing these tests to begin with.
“Why the hell were you testing on dogs and cats in the first place?” one critic bluntly asked.
“Why was this evil even being done?” another wondered.
X’s AI bot, Grok, says the Navy “conducted tests on cats and dogs primarily for biomedical research due to their physiological similarities to humans.”
“These experiments, often funded by the Department of Defense, including a $10 million DARPA contract, focused on conditions like cardiovascular issues, neurological disorders, constipation, and erectile dysfunction,” Grok reports.
Why did the Navy just decide to end these experiments? Reportedly because of an investigation by White Coat Waste (WCW), a nonprofit government watchdog that lobbies against animal testing by the feds.
“WCW investigations exposed how the Pentagon has been wasting millions of taxpayers’ money to maim cats and poison puppies in U.S. and Chinese labs,” according to a statement from the group.
“WCW uncovered how the [feds] crippled and electroshocked cats in constipation, incontinence and erectile dysfunction experiments,” the statement continued.
The Navy Secretary’s team confirmed that WCW’s investigation and campaign prompted the policy change to ban experiments on dogs and catshttps://t.co/t2MhGC6u8X
— White Coat Waste (@WhiteCoatWaste) May 28, 2025
One study reportedly involved paying a University of Pittsburgh lab a whopping $10.8 million to “sever cats’ spinal cords and paralyze their lower bodies,” “ram condoms and marbles up the cats’ anuses,” and “electro-shock the crippled cats to get erections and defecate.”
Writing for The Hill last year, WCW member Lawrence Hansen also wrote of a then-upcoming study of an experimental drug for Lou Gehrig’s disease involving beagles.
“These tests typically involve thrusting a tube down dogs’ throats to pump the drugs directly into their stomachs,” Hansen explained. “The procedure, which amounts to poisoning, often causes the dogs to vomit, convulse, and bleed.”
“In some cases, puppies as young as one week old have been abused in drug safety tests. Some dogs have their mouths taped shut so they can’t regurgitate the drugs, and some have their vocal cords cut so they can’t bark or cry out in the lab. At the end of testing, these hapless dogs are killed and dissected,” according to him.
“These tests typically involve thrusting a tube down dogs’ throats to pump the drugs directly into their stomachs. The procedure, which amounts to poisoning, often causes the dogs to vomit, convulse and bleed”https://t.co/0iTJsEFWcK
— White Coat Waste (@WhiteCoatWaste) June 14, 2024
There was also a study that involved injecting healthy cats with the COVID virus and then observing the cats until they died.
“The methodology of the experiment requires scientists to infect perfectly healthy cats with COVID-19, watch them suffer through infection for different lengths of time, and then kill them in groups of four,” according to Sen. Rand Paul’s 2024 Festivus report.
“Some were killed as early as two days after being infected. Some weren’t even infected with COVID-19 since they were the ‘control’ group, yet they
were still killed. Throughout the experiment, the cats were completely isolated in cages,” his reporting continued.
Thank you @SecNav and @DOGE for putting an end to this absurd waste. I exposed the Navy’s $10 million cat constipation experiments in my 2024 Festivus Report as a perfect example of government gone mad.
Read my report at:https://t.co/tPAKhcWd9f pic.twitter.com/kaetT3RXlj
— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) May 28, 2025
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V. Saxena is a staff writer with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University. Saxena also contributes to BizPac Review.
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