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CAMPAIGN UPDATES ACTION CENTER
Update (May 29, 2025): PETA thanked the Trump administration for its ban on Navy-funded dog and cat experiments announced this week and continues to urge a broader ban on all animal testing across all military branches in letters to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Secretary of the Navy John Phelan.
PETA specifically calls for a comprehensive agency-wide audit aimed at rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in cruel and outdated animal experimentation. PETA urges immediate action to:
- Ban the use of animals in U.S. Navy decompression sickness and oxygen toxicity tests
- Prohibit the use of dogs, cats, nonhuman primates, marine animals, and other animals currently permitted in Army weapon-wounding tests
- Ban the currently permitted DOD funding of tests on animals at foreign institutions. (For instance, an experimenter in Canada at the University of Alberta has received nearly $430,000 from DOD to use dogs as “models” of a muscle wasting disease. In Australia, the DOD paid a James Cook University experimenter $600,000 to burn rats’ bodies with scalding water and inflict “[u]ncontrolled hemorrhage.”)
Please add your voice to ours by taking action below.
Original post:
The U.S. Navy is squeezing the life out of animals in gruesome and often deadly decompression sickness/illness (DCS/DCI) and oxygen toxicity experiments (commonly referred to as ‘the bends’) that are as pointless as they are out of step with international standards. In 2024, after PETA urged then-Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro to stop carrying out these experiments on sheep at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the tests were stopped two years ahead of schedule, sparing sheep the agony of cardiovascular collapse, spinal cord injury, and paralysis.
But we’re not finished yet.
The Navy is still carrying out similar grisly experiments on pigs and other animals and funding other deadly tests at universities around the country. Click here to learn more about these horrifying experiments at Duke University and the University of South Florida—and take action to stop them.
PETA has sent letters to top Pentagon brass—previously teaming up with more than 100 Navy veterans—urging them to sink these wasteful and irrelevant tests.
Navies in France and the U.K. have already scrapped similar animal testing programs, making the U.S. Navy an outlier. And the Naval Medical Research Center has publicly acknowledged that tests on animals are unhelpful for humans: “animal DCS in many cases is more severe than that in humans and, therefore, appears ‘different’ from the average human case.”
What You Can Do
Please politely urge officials at the U.S. Department of War to end these deadly and pointless tests in favor of superior, human-relevant, non-animal research methods.