The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has ended experiments on beagles, the agency’s director said on May 4.
“We got rid of all of the beagle experiments on the NIH campus,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the NIH, said on Fox News.
The NIH said on social media platform X that the move was part of the agency’s new initiative to reduce animal use in research.
The announcement means the NIH no longer has any in-house dog labs, according to the White Coat Waste Project, which has been tracking the agency’s dog experiments for years.
The tests on beagles at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, have been taking place since at least 1986 and have resulted in the killing of thousands of dogs, according to the group. The testing involved giving the beagles pneumonia-causing bacteria and bleeding them out, forcing them into septic shock….