PETA’s Latest Hoax Exposed: Liberal Animal Rights Group Falsely Claims Trump Funding Russian Cat Torture, But White Coat Waste and Republican Lawmakers Ended It Years Ago

PETA is up to its same old tricks, once again making questionable claims and repackaging other groups’ work as its own.

On Friday, the liberal animal rights group published a new webpage stating, “Your Tax Dollars Fund Russian Experiments on Cats—Tell NIH No More!” and posted on social media that, “a foreign experimenter funded by the U.S. government, is mutilating…cats in Russia.”

The problem is that PETA’s claim seems to be false.

The NIH hasn’t funded these cat experiments in Russia for three years since the conservative watchdog group White Coat Waste first exposed and cut the funding.

WCW’s Senior Vice President Justin Goodman quickly jumped in on PETA’s social media posts to set the record straight.

Back in early 2022, WCW obtained records showing how the NIH was funding cat experiments at the Russian-government-tied Pavlov Institute of Physiology.

The group then led a grassroots campaign and lobbying effort that attracted support from both Republican and Democrat members of Congress.

WCW’s efforts, with people like GOP Conference Chair Rep. Lisa McClain and Senator Joni Ernst, ultimately led to the funding for those cat experiments and all other animal testing in Russia to be cut in 2023.

Since then, all Russian animal labs have been ineligible to receive any NIH funding, directly or indirectly.

PETA’s misleading new webpage claiming that “your tax dollars fund Russian experiments on cats” appears to be based on two 2025 research papers that actually say they used old data collected years earlier, before the NIH funding was cut.

The recent publications PETA is relying on also reference grant funding for cat experiments in Russia that WCW already led a successful campaign to cut back in 2023. The most recent version of the relevant NIH grant documents, obtained by WCW under the Freedom of Information Act, does not mention funding cat experiments in Russia or anywhere else, nor do federal funding databases.

PETA’s new campaign appears to be based on sloppy research at best, and a blatant lie at worst.

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