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Photo Credit: Molly Wald, Best Friends Animal Society
In case you haven't heard the gut wrenching news, the VA has just been given the go ahead to continue medical testing on dogs. These experiments are both invasive and fatal to the dogs. Before, this practice had major controversy, especially for veteran advocates, who pushed to put an end to this cruel act. According to the VA, these tests could help find solutions for veterans that suffer from breathing or spinal cord issues but this is proving to be extremely cruel to the involuntary testing candidates.
What's worse? They haven't even had any breakthroughs using dogs since the 1960s! Might be an unpopular opinion, but if you don't have any results after doing the same thing for 50-60 years, maybe try another method. Even veteran groups including the Paralyzed Veterans of American have spoken out about their opposition to these experiments.
Photo Credit: Long Room
According to the VA secretary who was fired due to allegations of missuse of taxpayer funds, signed the approval to continue this testing on the day he was fired. But according to him ,he did not approve this and it was delegated to the researchers. The result of this led Trump to signing a law that the secretary themself has to approve research. The secretary claims that dogs are the only viable model for these kind of experiments but going back to what was said before, how can something be viable when it doesn't prove any results for over 50 years?! “The VA has rarely developed any useful information to help veterans or anyone else through the experiments and the resources could be better used to provide care and services that are desperately needed by veterans now,” Justin Goodman said, vice president of the White Coast Waste Project, a taxpayer watchdog group.
Different VAs are conducting different experiments that lead to butchering and then death of these poor dogs. For example, in Milwaukee, researchers are removing bars of the dogs' brains in an effort to test the neurons that ultimately control breathing to which the dogs are then euthanized. Cleveland testing involves using electrons on dogs' spinal cords so they can then measure the couch reflexes both before and after SEVERING the spinal cords.
Photo Credit: Military Times
While apparently 99% of testing done by the VA is done on mice and rats, they claim that the use of dogs was still necessary. Rep. Dina Titus, who is one of pearl 100 members of Congress that backs veteran advocacy organizations' initiatives, stated that "I’m proud of the progress we’ve made so far, but deeply disturbed by the VA’s abominable insistence on hurting puppies and other dogs in outdated research. My colleagues and I are going to keep fighting until all of the VA’s dog lab cages are empty,” statement to the Daily News.
Photo Credit: Daily Mail
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