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“Push it to the right” strategy wins––& takes other animal groups to the right as well
WASHINGTON D.C.––“The Donald Trump administration’s Department of Defense has announced that it is cutting funding for wasteful and cruel experiments on cats,” posted White Coat Waste digital marketing expert Allison McDonald on the afternoon of May 17, 2025.
The first-line mention of Trump, and that the release came from a “digital marketing expert,” i.e. an electronic flack, rather than a campaign figurehead, revealed quite a bit about how the war was won through use of right-leaning social media.
“White Coast Waste investigations,” hitting social media in July 2024, “exposed how the Department of Defense has been wasting $10.8 million of taxpayers’ money to cripple and electroshock cats in constipation, incontinence, and erectile dysfunction experiments” at the University of Pittsburgh, McDonald continued.
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Musk, Loomer, & Hegseth
“The DOD’s decision follows pressure from Elon Musk and Laura Loomer,” McDonald added, mentioning two more far-right media icons.
“The cats victory comes days after White Coat Waste shut down the National Institutes of Health’s last in-house dog lab following a nine-year White Coat Waste campaign,” McDonald recounted, then detailed the campaign history.
The bottom line: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ”cut the money.”
Yes, McDonald mentioned Hegseth too.
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NIH shut last beagle lab
Alexandra Koch of Fox News on May 4, 2025 broadcast that National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya had closed “the last in-house beagle laboratory on the NIH campus, just days after Department of Government Efficiency head Elon Musk posted on X that he would investigate funding beagle experiments,” following “A report from the White Coat Waste project that detailed the lab’s history of allegedly pumping pneumonia-causing bacteria into more than 2,000 beagles’ lungs, bleeding them out, and forcing them into septic shock for deadly experiments.”
The experiments were conducted over 40 years.
Cautioned Humane World for Animals president Kitty Block, “This does not mean that the National Institutes of Health has stopped funding dog tests entirely, nor does it end the continued use of dogs in experiments that are not funded by NIH. But it’s a step forward, and it’s one we are determined will be a sign of a larger change.”
Unspoken was acknowledgement that White Coat Waste has recently won again and again on battlefields where much older and bigger animal advocacy groups have bogged down for decades like World War I combatants mired in muddy trenches.
Anthony Bellotti, president White Coat Waste Project. (Facebook photo)
“We had to push it to the right”
“We had to push it to the right,” White Coat Waste Project founder Anthony Bellotti said of opposition to animal-based biomedical research, speaking to Yasmeen Abutaleb and Beth Reinhard of the Washington Post in November 2021.
Opposition to animal-based biomedical research had already historically been a cause of the right since the mid-19th century.
Much of the nineteenth century opposition was based on the notion that the Biblical God created humanity in His own image, not through evolution as outlined by Charles Darwin, and that dissecting animals could therefore tell humans little about how to treat human conditions and diseases.
This theme dominated anti-vivisectionism for more than 100 years.
(See Fauci vs. the White Coat Waste Project: did Hans Ruesch sire the conflict? and Conservatism, the religious right, & the evolution of anti-vivisectionism.)
Charles Darwin & friend.
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Humane societies split with AV
Opposing animal-based biomedical research was in fact so much perceived as a cause of the right that between 1895 and 1920 most mainstream humane societies, seeing themselves as inherently allied with left-leaning social reform causes, emphatically split with religiously motivated fundamentalist anti-vivisectionists.
That was no small schism. By 1920 almost every major U.S. city had a local anti-vivisection society, actively opposing vaccinations and fluoridated water, having ever less to do with advocacy for animals.
Rather than reunite with anti-vivisectionists in the mid-1940s, the American SPCA, founded in 1866, and the American Humane Association, founded in 1877, each grudgingly accepted “pound seizure,” meaning the use of impounded dogs and cats in biomedical research.
This led directly to the formation by breakaway ASPCA and American Humane Association members of the Animal Welfare Institute in 1951 and the Humane Society of the U.S. in 1954.
University of Wisconsin Primate Research Center founder Harry Harlow.
Swing to the left
Politically mainstream, the Animal Welfare Institute and Humane Society of the U.S. evolved strategies of “moderate” or “welfarist” opposition to animal use in biomedical research, stopping short of aligning themselves with the abolitionist approach of the anti-vivisectionists, whose organizations by then had become, through the growing influence of the biomedical research industry, politically marginalized and economically failing.
The rise of the late 20th century animal rights movement out of the 1960s-1970s era of campus activism, originally focused on civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War, pushed public perception of opposition to animal experiments far to the left.
A 1970 bombing at the University of Wisconsin Primate Research Center heightened the perceived linkage of causes, even after the bombing was found to have been a failed attempt by four anti-Vietnam War protesters to bomb the Army Mathematics Research Center across the street.
(See NIH kills one of last legacies of vivisector Harry Harlow.)
Former racing driver turned author Hans Ruesch (1913-2007) led the “scientific” anti-vivisection cause for the last 30 years of his life.
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AV movement stalled
Animal rights movement opposition to animal experiments shifted from “scientific” anti-vivisectionism, based on the idea that animals are so unlike humans that animal-based research is useless, to the idea that animals and humans are so much alike that doing anything to an animal that would be perceived as too cruel to do to a human is inherently also too cruel to do to the animal.
After some initial successes, however, ending for all practical purposes with winning a 1985 set of amendments to the Animal Welfare Act on behalf of dogs and non-human primates, the “animal rights” approach to anti-vivisectionism stalled.
Even as the animal cause changed mainstream American culture on other fronts, federal funding for animal-based biomedical research doubled.
Bellotti, a former Republican political strategist whose misgivings about animal experiments originated during a high school internship at a biomedical research lab, formed the White Coast Waste Project in 2013.
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White Coat Waste followed the money
Bypassing the “animals are like us/not like us” argument entirely, Bellotti targeted specifically federally funded cruel experiments using dogs, cats, and sometimes monkeys, arguing simply that––besides being cruel––they waste taxpayer money.
Avoiding criticism of privately funded research, and of experiments on rodents, rabbits, and non-mammals, White Coast Waste opened influential doors during the first Donald Trump administration.
Since then, White Coat Waste almost seems to have written the biomedical research agenda in the early months of the budget-slashing second Donald Trump administration.
The National Institutes of Health, Food & Drug Administration, and Environmental Protection Agency have all introduced policy changes defunding or constricting funding for animal experiments.
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“Faces of Waste”
Simultaneously, the Trump administration, for officially unrelated reasons, has frozen research funding to universities including Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Northwestern, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Brown.
Three of these seven universities include among their faculty four of the “Faces of Waste” identified by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals [PETA] in a May 7, 2025 media release subtitled “14 Experimenters Wasted $500 Million Killing Animals.”
“PETA has pointed out frivolous spending and government waste for far longer than those have been buzzwords,” the PETA media release continued, in backhanded acknowledgement of White Coat Waste Project influence.
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“Rife with pointlessness”
“The animal experimentation industry is rife with pointlessness that somehow absorbs taxpayer dollars like a dry sponge,” PETA said. “These 14 people are experimenters who set fire to taxpayer dollars by the fistful. Each of their experiments plumbs new depths of cruelty or pointlessness. Often both.”
Among them were Augustine Choi of Cornell University, Michael Platt of the University of Pennsylvania, and George Daley and Margaret Livingstone of the Harvard Medical School.
(See “Stop torturing baby monkeys!” Harvard Animal Law Clinic tells Harvard Med.)
Paradoxically, the Harvard Law School also hosts the Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law & Policy and the Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law & Policy Program.
However, according to Delcianna Winders, who was the first academic fellow of the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Program and now heads the Animal Law & Policy Institute at the Vermont Law & Graduate School, the Harvard animal law programs are “funded by a $10 million endowment and thus should not be imperiled by the showdown between Harvard and the Trump administration.”
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Oregon National Primate Research Center
PETA has also charged through a door opened by White Coat Waste Project, specifically a federal budget amendment to ban research facilities from using public funds to cover “medically unnecessary” testing on dogs and cats, to try to close the sixty-year-old Oregon National Primate Research Center at the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.
“The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have accused the university of abusing monkeys by keeping them confined in tight areas and neglecting to treat them when they’re sick,” summarized Jashayla Pettigrew for KOIN television news on May 14, 2025.
The PETA complaints began after undercover operative Matt Rossell exposed alleged psychological neglect of the animals there in August 2000, having worked for two years at the center as a primate care tech.
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Problems not fixed in 25 years
Oregon Health Sciences University, responsible for the center and the 2,500 primates kept there, hired pathology and psychology professor Carol Shively, of Wake Forest University in Raleigh, North Carolina, to assess Rossell’s charges.
Shively essentially upheld Rossell’s complaints, according to WW News reporter Philip Dawdy, who got the Shively report in March 2001 after three months of legal skirmishing to force Oregon Health Sciences University to comply with the state public records disclosure act.
But the problems were not fixed. The Oregon National Primate Center “has violated the federal Animal Welfare Act repeatedly year after year,” testified Amy Meyer for PETA at a May 13, 2025 House Committee On Emergency Management, General Government, & Veterans hearing.
“They cannot get it right,” Meyer charged, “and every violation cited by the U.S. Department of Agriculture means horrific suffering and often a terrible death has happened to the monkeys caged there.”
Wayne Pacelle at Chimp Haven sanctuary for ex-NIH chimps in Lousiana.
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“Shut it down,” says Pacelle
“The New England Regional Primate Center was shuttered more than a decade ago,” noted Animal Wellness Action and Center for a Humane Economy president Wayne Pacelle, pointing out that even Oregon governor Tina Kotek “recently and publicly advocated for the closure of the Oregon National Primate Research Center.
“In late March 2025,” Pacelle said, “her office confirmed that she urged Oregon Health Sciences University leadership to complete their current research obligations and move toward shutting down the center in a humane and responsible manner.”
Pacelle on May 13, 2025 asked National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya to close the Oregon National Primate Research Center, and asked Animal Wellness Action and Center for a Humane Economy members to write letters in support of same.
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Rise for Animals wakes up
Even the New England Anti-Vivisection Society, founded in 1895, long semi-moribund, rebranded Rise for Animals in 2020, seems to have come alive amid the Trumpist political fervor to dismantle self-serving “deep state” bureaucracy.
Recounted Rise for Animals in a May 13, 2025 email to donors, “Last week, our co-plaintiff and expert counsel, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, stood before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to fight for what the USDA has tried desperately to avoid: transparency, accountability, and the rule of law.
“In a clandestine move,” Rise for Animals detailed, “the USDA abandoned its legal duty to conduct routine annual inspections of all registered animal research facilities. Instead, the agency secretly directed its inspectors to perform only so-called “focused” inspections of facilities claiming voluntary accreditation by a private industry trade group,” the Association for Assessment & Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care International.
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USDA outsourced regulation to the research industry
Founded in 1965, AAALAC has operated under the present name since 1996.
“By doing this,” Rise for Animals explained, “the USDA effectively outsourced federal regulation to the animal research industry itself – and, it did this after Congress refused to give AAALAC regulatory power, without publicly disclosing its revised policies or changed practices.”
Charged Rise for Animals, “By cross-referencing USDA inspection report data with AAALAC’s lists of accredited facilities, we now know that about 75% of all direct and critical citations issued by the USDA between 2014 and March 2025 were issued to AAALAC-accredited labs.
Beth & Merritt Clifton with friends.
“This means that the very facilities the USDA claims need less oversight are, in fact, three times more likely to be cited for serious animal welfare violations,” even though “AAALAC-accredited labs made up less than half of the facilities inspected during the same period.”
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