Credit: Yerkes National Primate Research Center

Yesterday, as Americans prepare to file their annual tax returns, In Defense of Animals unveiled its “Top 10 Reasons Why Animal Research is a Cruel Joke” in recognition of ridiculous and wasteful experiments funded by your tax dollars. Why now? Because, when it comes to animal research, every day is April Fool’s Day for American taxpayers.

IDA’s “Top 10” list was selected from the “cream of the scientific crop”: National Institutes of Health-funded experiments that were selected from scientific papers published in 2009 and 2010 (and one from 2008), approved by federally-mandated oversight committees, and published in peer-reviewed journals.  Yet, these experiments add nothing to medical progress and tell us nothing we care to know.  Here are a few examples of experiments that made the Top 10 list:

Warning:  Entire List Contains Graphic and/or Sexual Content

• Female rats might enjoy vaginal stimulation (Dartmouth)
• Mice need only  wheel, not shocks, for  wheel-running (University of North Carolina)
• Baby chimpanzees need nurturing (Emory University/Yerkes National Primate Center)
• Trapped rats freak out (San Diego State Univ., Colorado State Univ., Univ. of Arizona)
• Lizards forced to fight get stressed and then decapitated (Harvard and Univ. of South Dakota)
• Castrated monkeys are less dominant (NIH’s internal intramural labs in Bethesda, Maryland)

These experiments are just the tip of the iceberg of waste in biomedical animal research and the Top 10 list is just the beginning of IDA’s Ridiculous Research campaign.  IDA will continue to expose experiments like these on a regular basis in order to demonstrate that archaic and absurd animal experiments funded by your tax dollars are being conducted every day – not just April’s Fool Day.

Click here to read the entire list and learn more about what you can do to help these animals!