His group hopes to end most, if not all, of the dog experiments. "There is a staggering lack of transparency and a lack of accountability," Bellotti says. "They're purposely trying to misinform the public." Dog research alone, he says, has improved our understanding of diseases like cancer and hemophilia and helped develop pacemakers and organ transplants.īut White Coat Waste also alleges that, aside from NIH, most federal agencies are opaque about how many dogs they use, the details of these experiments, and how much they cost. For instance, "all sepsis studies aren't the same," he says. It also slams what it calls redundancy in such research, citing, for example, three separate NIH experiments on sepsis and hemorrhage in dogs. The document, which mainly focuses on federally funded dog research, claims that more than 1100 canines are being subjected to cruel, unnecessary experiments in government labs. Those were also the major themes of a report White Coat Waste released timed to the hearing, Spending to Death. She vowed to work with White Coat Waste and her congressional colleagues to bring more transparency to government research and help phase out wasteful and unnecessary experiments. The event was co-hosted by Representatives from both sides of the aisle-Ken Calvert (R–CA), a spending hawk, and Dina Titus (D–NV), who, in response to a campaign by the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), helped end psychological experiments on baby monkeys at a National Institutes of Health (NIH) lab last year. Replete with images that wouldn't be out of place in a video produced by an animal rights group-lab mice with blood coming out of their eyes, monkeys with metal screws in their heads-the program features comments from antitax conservatives, including Representative Tom Marino (R–PA), an early Donald Trump supporter who calls for more oversight of government agencies that fund animal studies.īut White Coat Waste made its biggest splash last week with its Capitol Hill briefing. That's when it had its first big exposure in Socialized Science, a documentary executive produced by conservative political commentator Glenn Beck. "I wanted to unite the animal lovers and the liberty lovers." Red-blue allianceīellotti founded White Coat Waste in 2013, though he says the group has become active only since last year. "That story was being told in the Planned Parenthood and Obamacare debates, but not in the anti–animal research movement," he says. After he became a political consultant, he hit upon the idea of framing such research as a waste of taxpayer money. His opposition to animal research began in 1995, when, in the summer between high school and college, he worked in a hospital laboratory that was conducting heart studies on pigs and witnessed experiments he saw as cruel. White Coat Waste, based in Washington, D.C., is the brainchild of Anthony Bellotti, a former Republican strategist who has consulted for campaigns against Obamacare and Planned Parenthood. "It's a new way to crowbar off policymakers who might not otherwise support" efforts to end the use of animals in research. "I can't think of any right-wing groups that have taken on animal research before," says Tom Holder, the director of Speaking of Research, an international organization that supports the use of animals in scientific labs. Speakers called on policymakers to launch an audit of the agencies that fund animal research, and depicted animal studies as another example of big government spending run amok. Last week, the group made its first foray into the political arena, holding a briefing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., for reporters and congressional staff. "Painful, bizarre, and wasteful experiments." Buying dogs "just to cut them apart … and kill them." These statements might sound like the rhetoric used by extreme animal rights groups, but they come from White Coat Waste-a new, unlikely coalition of fiscal conservatives and liberal activists that aims to end federal funding for research involving dogs and other animals by targeting people's pocketbooks in addition to their heartstrings.
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