• Victory: White Coat Waste Project (WCW) shut down the final lab at the Dept. of Veterans Affairs (VA) that was doing painful tests on dogs. It’s the end of VA dog testing as we know it.
• This Richmond lab injected latex into puppies’ arteries, forced them to run on treadmills, and surgically induced heart attacks. No pain relief. No anesthesia.
• When WCW launched this campaign, 220 dogs were abused annually across VA labs, including 111 in the U.S. government’s most painful experiments. Now, no dogs are being abused in painful VA experiments.
• This is the 1st time in American history that dog testing has been shuttered across an entire federal agency.
• Since 2007—for the better part of a generation—no other group has shut down any federal dog labs at all.

In November 2016—almost exactly six years ago—White Coat Waste Project (WCW) released its first major investigation called “Spending to Death.” In the groundbreaking report, we exposed how government agencies were wasting millions of tax dollars to abuse puppies and dogs in painful and outdated experiments.

We soon launched the first-ever national campaign to defund dog testing at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). We set our sights on the VA because it was experimenting on hundreds of beagles and other dogs at agency labs across the country and was doing the most painful dog tests in the entire federal government.

Actual photo obtained by WCW via a Richmond lab whistleblower who exposed botched surgeries and dogs forced to run on treadmills in heart attack tests.

Since then–with the support of Congress, veterans and whistleblowers–we’ve been steadily knocking out the VA’s deadly (even illegal!) dog labs. WCW shut down the VA’s wasteful spending to inject latex into puppies’ arteries, drill holes into beagles’ skulls, collapse the lungs of “friendly” dogs, cut out living dogs’ hearts, inject Dobermans with methamphetamines, and force hounds to run on treadmills in heart attack tests.

Now, we’ve obtained documents confirming that following WCW’s six years of relentless campaigning, lobbying, lawsuits, and investigations, the VA has ended painful dog experiments at its Richmond, Virginia lab, the agency’s final holdout. 

WCW’s campaign to shut down VA dog testing has been one of historic firsts, including:

• First time ever that Congress enacted a law defunding dog tests and giving an agency a hard deadline to phase out animal tests (dogs, cats, and primates, specifically)
• First time an agency formally committed to cutting experiments on dogs (as well as cats and primates)
• First state law enacted (in Virginia) defunding maximum pain experiments on dogs and cats
• First time a federal agency enacted a lab animal retirement policy
• First time the National Academy of Sciences criticized a federal agency’s wasteful dog tests as “unnecessary” 

In 2016, when our effort started, the VA abused nearly 220 dogs in experiments. Now, zero dogs are being tormented in painful and deadly VA testing, and we’re going to work to keep it that way and extend the progress to other federal agencies (hear that, NIH?).

WCW is the only organization to shut down any government dog tests in nearly 20 years, and we’ve wiped them out across an entire agency!

Watch the blog for a deeper dive into the work we did to find, expose and defund the VA’s wasteful dog testing.