In a move that’s both shameless and predictable, the deceptively named People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is doing the media rounds pretending to be heroes of the NIH beagle lab shutdown, when in reality they weren’t involved and killed more cats and dogs just last year than the now shuttered lab did in 40 years.
The real MVP in saving these animals was the White Coat Waste Project (WCW), a scrappy taxpayer watchdog with about six percent of PETA’s budget. Since 2016, the bipartisan organization has been relentlessly fighting to close down the National Institutes of Health’s cruel dog labs.
As WCW was doing real work, PETA was collecting COVID bailout money and racking up a body count of cats and dogs, which made the NIH’s four-decade death tally look like amateur hour.
The NIH’s beagle lab, a house of horrors where these animals have been subjected to shocking experiments since 1986, was shuttered in May 2025 under the Trump administration’s NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya. Over the last 40 years, 2,133 beagles were tortured and killed by the researchers there.
Hellbound and Down 