Our campaign to expose and end wasteful government experiments on dogs and other animals is picking up steam. Our supporters have sent more than 57,000 letters to Congress, a growing bipartisan group of Congress members is taking government agencies to task, and we’re making headlines nationwide.

Now, world-class scientists are speaking out, too.  In a new op-ed in the San Diego Union-Tribune, one of the White Coat Waste Project’s scientific advisers, Dr. Lawrence Hansen, writes:

As a physician, researcher and dog lover — and someone who once reluctantly experimented on dogs — a new bipartisan push to end the government’s use of dogs for invasive and unnecessary experiments in Southern California and elsewhere is a welcome development for ethical, scientific and economic reasons.

Dr. Hansen knows his stuff. He is a professor of neuroscience and pathology at the University of California-San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine. He teaches, works with patients, conducts research and has been recognized as of the “Top 100 Alzheimer’s Disease Investigators” by the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. He continues in the eye-opening op-ed:

Experiments on dogs aren’t scientifically “necessary,” especially when we have superior research technologies like human organs-on-chips to model diseases and test drugs. 

Unfortunately, like the old-school medical student dog labs, these taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs are a bad habit that’s hard to break. Constantly developing, testing, discarding and retooling doomed animal “models” of human ailments has become a perpetually blooming money tree for government employees and the companies that sell them puppies to infect, cut up and kill. The NIH’s forced heart attack experiments on dogs alone have received just shy of $6 million since 2011.