In July of 2023, House lawmakers, Dina Titus (D-Nevada) and Troy Nehls (R-Texas) sponsored the Cease Animal Grants Overseas (CARGO) Act (HR4757). This Act would have prohibited the NIH from awarding grants, contracts, cooperative agreements, or technical assistance of any kind to any foreign entity for experiments on animals. Unfortunately, the bill stalled in committee.
In February of this year, Titus and Nehls reintroduced the ACT, now HR1085, with the same goal as before – to stop the NIH from giving our tax dollars to foreign governments to brutalize animals in laboratories. Between 2011 and 2021, the NIH awarded over $2.2 billion in grants to foreign vivisection laboratories, including Canada, South America, Europe, and Asia. Rep. Titus has said that animal experimentation programs in these countries “fail to hold up under intensive scrutiny or are exempt from that oversight altogether, resulting in the abuse of animals through experiments funded by tax payer dollars.”
We already know that in this country The Animal Welfare Act fails to protect animals in laboratories allowing torture and fraud to continue unabated in the U.S. even after the Act was passed. In other countries the torture is as bad or worse. And we are paying for all of it.
Titus also said, “The CARGO Act is a critical stop in ending animal suffering and redirecting resources to more reliable and humane research methods in the United States.” We wish Titus, who has been a constant and ardent supporter in Congress of ending animal suffering, would make clear that non animal research methods are not “more reliable” because vivisection is never reliable. The only research the NIH should be funding is non animal methods and clinical research, all of it available right now. Click on this link to find out about some of those non animal research methods. https://kindnessandscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/KSA-If-Not-Animal-Experimentation-Then-What-2-1.pdf
With a different make up in Congress since the last time the Act was introduced, maybe there is an increased possibility that the Act will now be passed. We must not give up on this. It is too important. And every time we contact our representatives in Congress about vivisection it gives us a chance to educate them about the fact that all animal experimentation is fraud and abuse.
TAKE ACTION
Please copy the following paragraph and click on democracy.io then fill in your name and address to be taken to a site where you can contact your own members of Congress. Then paste the message into the message area. Sharing your own thoughts is even more effective.
Dear (your representative)
I am writing to you today as your constituent to ask you to please support the CARGO ACT – HR 1085. It’s time to stop the fraud, waste, and horrific experiments in overseas vivisection labs funded by the National Institutes of Health who exercise no oversight whatsoever. Experiments on animals cannot be extrapolated to humans and using the excuse that these experiments somehow benefit humans is completely false. Giving our hard-earned tax dollars to allow vivisectors to brutalize animals is unacceptable both at home and abroad. A notorious NIH lab in Colombia which was investigated and shut down by the Colombian government is only one example of the criminal waste perpetrated by NIH-funded vivisectors overseas. Despite being aware of the horrendous plight of the animals in this lab, it took 6 months for the NIH to stop funding the husband-and-wife team of vivisectors who owned the two NIH-funded facilities and only after the Colombian government took action to shut them down. Passing this act will save taxpayers billions of dollars. I want my money to be spent on scientific, clinical research here at home, not on animal torture which has nothing to do with advancing the state of health for human beings.
Thank you for your time and your support of this very important Act.
Sincerely,
It’s so important that you take the time to contact your members of Congress. Always remember, we are the only hope the animals have.
