President Donald Trump has permanently ended the National Institutes of Health (NIH)'s experimentation on beagles, closing the agency's last experimentation lab over the weekend.
NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya announced the closure during an interview with Fox News's Rachel Campos-Duffy, which you can watch here:
Watch @NIHDirector_Jay on @FoxNews with @RCamposDuffy where he discusses a new NIH initiative to expand innovative, human-based science while reducing animal use in research, including getting rid of all the beagle experiments on the NIH campus. pic.twitter.com/qfL5oepOBX
— NIH (@NIH) May 4, 2025
Bhattacharya said the move was part of a broader policy change that replaced animal experimentation with AI and other technologies that better mimic human health.
“It’s very easy, for instance, to cure Alzheimer’s in mice. But those things don’t translate to humans,” Bhattacharya said.
Bhattacharya acknowledged that people have had a hard time trusting the NIH since the COVID-19 pandemic, when the organization pushed school lockdowns and vaccines way too hard.
He didn't say it, but the Chinese facility where the virus most likely came from got funding from the NIH, which may be another reason why Americans are mistrustful of the NIH.
The NIH confirmed the policy change on social media, saying it has begun an “initiative to expand innovative, human-based science while reducing animal use in research, including getting rid of all the beagle experiments on the NIH campus.”
The watchdog group White Coat Waste said that the NIH has killed 2,100 beagles since 1986 in septic shock experiments.
“The NIH pumps pneumonia-causing bacteria into beagles’ lungs, bleeds them out, and forces dogs into septic shock,” the group's report stated. “After four days of infection, NIH kills the beagles—and stuffs their bodies into a refrigerator.”
“We applaud the President for cutting this wasteful NIH spending and will keep fighting until we defund all dog labs at home and abroad," the group said.
Other experiments on beagles that involved infesting puppies with ticks at Kansas City University became a big scandal in 2021 and turned public opinion against then-director Anthony Fauci.
DOGE has been looking for wasteful spending, and these experiments certainly don't need to be publicly funded.
If scientists want to kill beagles after torturing them, let them find someone in the private sector to fund it, if they can.
