• White Coat Waste is supporting an Alabama Open Records Act lawsuit by an Auburn University alum to force the school to release documents detailing its National Institutes of Health-funded kitten breeding and experimentation laboratory.
• WCW’s investigation, first launched in 2023, exposed how Auburn University breeds sick kittens to suffer from debilitating and deadly diseases, conducts invasive experiments on them, and kills the kittens at just a few months old.
• Video uncovered by WCW shows one kitten struggling to walk and, according to Auburn, close to death.
• Auburn’s cruel kitten experiments are currently funded by taxpayer dollars via the NIH and have been supported by other agencies, including the NSF and USDA.
• Auburn also ships kittens to other taxpayer-funded labs, including those at the Smithsonian Institution.
• Since 2023, WCW has been fighting to end Auburn’s taxpayer-funded kitten abuse.

UPDATED (3/26/26): White Coat Waste is supporting an Alabama Open Records Act lawsuit to force Auburn University to turn over documents detailing its cruel kitten breeding and experimentation laboratory that is funded in part by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The new lawsuit focuses on Auburn’s refusal to release these records in response to a July 2025 request from an Alabama taxpayer and Auburn University alum. WCW has also been fighting to obtain similar records from Auburn since 2023.

The kitten laboratory is currently funded by an NIH grant slated to run until at least May 31, 2026. The NIH grant, which has cost taxpayers $206,337 to date, involves breeding kittens with severe genetic diseases, sticking needles in their skulls, administering brain injections, and killing them at just a few months old.

In direct response to pressure from WCW and Congress, Trump NIH officials have claimed they are “working tirelessly” to phase out cat and dog testing, but instead have handed out over $126 million in new taxpayer funds for experiments on pets since Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. took office in February 2025.

ORIGINAL POST (10/18/23)

White Coat Waste is a Project to get the U.S. government out of the cat testing business. For years, we’ve been investigating how dogs and cats end up in experimentation labs funded with our tax dollars by the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Kitten Slaughterhouse to the notorious Envigo puppy mill, to NIH’s Bleeding Beagles colony and an NIH-funded lab that rounds up and abuses abandoned pet dogs.

Now, we’ve discovered an Auburn University lab that for nearly half a century has bred thousands of sick kittens, including the helpless Siamese cat in the video below, destined for painful and deadly taxpayer-funded experiments at Auburn and other labs.

Auburn’s kitten mill breeds cats to suffer from debilitating genetic disorders that, among other things, cause loss of muscle control, difficulty walking, vision loss, tremors, and early death. The sick and paralyzed kitten in the video above obtained by our investigators was bred at Auburn and described as close to death by Auburn’s white coats at just 6 months old.  In the video, you can see other cats confined in Auburn’s lab, too.

In total, Auburn confined and abused 338 cats and kittens in its labs in 2022, a nearly 40 percent increase from the previous year. Auburn reports that around 150 of these cats and kittens are held in its breeding colony.

Auburn’s taxpayer-funded experiments include breeding cats to have brain damage and then killing and dissecting them, overfeeding kittens to induce obesity and diabetes, infecting kittens with Feline Immunodeficiency Virus (FIV) and heartworm, force feeding cats experimental drugs. Some of Auburn’s cats were even dosed with the marijuana derivative CBD.

Auburn’s harmful cat experiments are also funded by taxpayer-funded agencies including the NIH, the National Science Foundation and the USDA.

WCW’s investigation has also obtained documents via the Freedom of Information Act showing that in 2022 the taxpayer-funded Smithsonian Institution procured seven cats bred at Auburn’s kitten mill.

Documents obtained by WCW also detail how Auburn’s animal labs were cited for 10 violations of federal animal welfare laws in August, including having dirty dog and cat cages, failing to search for alternatives to painful procedures, and allowing untrained students to kill rabbits with inadequate anesthesia.

WCW submitted open records requests to Auburn and the Smithsonian in August 2023 for more details about this kitten mill and experimentation on these cats, but they have refused to turn over documents, and we are fighting for their release.

Is this how you want your money spent?