The U.S. Navy would like you to believe it no longer kills animals in cruel decompression and oxygen toxicity tests.
That’s why Navy personnel told PETA supporters during a recent call-in action that the military branch had ended these tests.
But it’s simply not true.
Recently, PETA successfully pushed the Navy to sink its decompression experiments on sheep at the University of Wisconsin–Madison up to two years ahead of schedule, following our letter to Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro.
But Navy-funded experiments conducted on other animals at Duke University, the University of California–San Diego, the University of Maryland–Baltimore, and the University of South Florida have continued.
This doomed animal in a hyperbaric chamber is one of the countless rats who University of South Florida experimenter Jay Dean has used to supposedly study oxygen toxicity in humans, even though human-relevant, animal-free methods are widely available.
Mice and rats used in these tests are forced to run on a treadmill, and they’re electroshocked if they can’t keep up. Chemicals are injected into their brains and rubbed into their eyes. Their skulls are drilled into, and their rectums are probed. In the end, experimenters kill them, sometimes by bleeding or gassing them to death. This horror is all part of an attempt to study decompression sickness, more commonly known as “the bends.”
PETA has contacted top military officials and the schools’ leaders, urging them to abandon ship on these cruel and wasteful tests, which have received more than $3.8 million in taxpayer funding.
Now PETA is asking you to TAKE ACTION and urge the Navy, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the four universities involved to end the use of all animals in these pointless and deadly decompression sickness and oxygen toxicity experiments in favor of superior, human-relevant, non-animal research methods.
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