As veterans, we believe military research should be judged by one clear standard: whether it protects service members, strengthens readiness, and responsibly advances care for today’s warfighters. We are writing to urge you to end the Navy’s funding of decompression sickness/illness and oxygen toxicity experiments (commonly referred to as ‘the bends’) on animals that fail to meet that standard and instead subject animals to cruel, irrelevant tests. We understand from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ May 6, 2026, letter to you that tens of millions of dollars in public funds are supporting animal testing—much of it ongoing—across the Department of War. At a time when military research dollars should be focused on readiness, accountability, and technologies that can meaningfully improve care for service members, these programs warrant immediate scrutiny.
We are particularly troubled by the U.S. Navy’s funding of decompression sickness and oxygen toxicity studies, which have subjected animals to pressure-chamber experiments, despite serious limits in their relevance to human physiology. Most recently, a Navy-funded Duke University study forced 40 pigs into diapers and heated diving suits before forcing them to endure simulated deep dives that caused decompression sickness, painful blood vessel blockages, paralysis, hemorrhaging, and, for many animals, death. Similarly, the University of South Florida received more than half a million dollars to subject rats to oxygen-toxicity experiments that induced seizures and required implanted recording devices.
These experiments are only the latest in a decades-long series of Navy-funded animal tests that have failed to produce new treatments for decompression sickness. Research intended to protect divers, aviators, and other service members should rely on methods that are directly applicable to human health—not on animal models with limited relevance to human physiology and clinical outcomes.
Research conducted in the name of service members should be directly relevant to human health and military readiness. Experiments that inflict decompression sickness, oxygen toxicity, seizures, paralysis, hemorrhaging, and death on animals while failing to reliably translate to human outcomes divert resources from advanced simulators, computational models, organoids, organs-on-chips, and other human-relevant technologies that could better serve troops.
We respectfully ask you to prohibit Department of War funds from supporting decompression sickness and oxygen toxicity experiments on animals and instead direct those resources toward superior, human-relevant, animal-free research methods.