The White Coat Waste Project (WCW) has been leading a historic campaign to end wasteful spending at the Dept. of Veterans Affairs (VA).

WCW recently shut down the VA’s last painful dog lab. We’ve been making rapid progress to end its taxpayer-funded cat labs, too.

In December 2019, WCW submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the VA’s photos, videos, invoices, veterinary records, and grant applications.

We exposed how the Louisville lab bought dozens of healthy female kittens for $881 apiece.

VA white coats damaged their spines and forced the disabled cats to navigate obstacle courses like this:

The survivors were then handed over to another lab where white coats mutilated kittens’ legs and cut out their brain stems…

…while the cats were still alive.

“Decerebration” is a fancy term for severing a living cat’s brain stem and turning her into a zombie.

After that, the decerebrated zombie kittens were forced to run on treadmills. (Here’s a video of a decerebrated cat on a treadmill, to give you a sense of what it looks like.)

The Louisville lab planned to waste 80 kittens.

Cats like “Pecan” (gov’t ID #15KQC4)—a female mackerel tabby who was “eager for head rubs and chin rubs.”

And this “very friendly and affectionate” female grey tabby (gov’t ID #19008):

WCW united Republicans and Democrats to put the Louisville lab on the hot seat:

In August 2020, we rallied 30 bipartisan Members of Congress to demand answers from the VA.

This big win also follows our hard-hitting campaign, which:

• Passed legislation to defund the VA’s kitten experiments.
• Introduced the CATS ACT to permanently defund VA’s wasteful spending.
• Organized a national grassroots army of liberty lovers and kitten lovers.
• Got a big boost from “Kitten Lady” Hannah Shaw.
• Enacted a historic phase-out of all VA cat, dog, and primate testing by 2025.

Over the last 40 months, WCW shut down the VA’s $5 million Los Angeles kitten lab, ended $4.9 million experiments at the VA’s Cleveland lab, and secured the release of some survivors.

We also annihilated USDA’s $22 million Kitten Slaughterhouse—the federal government’s largest cat lab—and retired all of the survivors.

This win puts us closer than ever to sending all of Uncle Sam’s wasteful cat labs to the litter box of history.