Cleveland VA Will No Longer Test or Experiment on Cats, Advocacy Group Announces

The Cleveland VA Credit: Tim Evanson/FlickrCC

They were known as the Stokes Seven.

Last year, Denis McDonough, the U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs wrote a letter to the Subcommittee on Military Construction approving a research study at Cleveland’s Louis Stokes Department of Veterans Affairs “that will involve felines.”

Seven cats’ hamstrings and shoulder blades would be punctured with high-density muscle connectors, as to monitor their physiology. It would be, McDonough said, a “benefit [for] Veteran stroke survivors.”

Last week, the White Coat Waste Project, a D.C.-based animals rights group founded in 2020, announced that $270,000 experimentation on four-legged friends would no longer be policy and practice at Cleveland’s Veterans hospital.

“This marks the complete end to dog and cat testing at the VA,” WCWP founder Justin Goodman said in a statement. “This is the first federal agency that has completely eliminated dog and cat testing, and now we are hoping we can get other agencies and get Congress to follow suit and do it elsewhere.”

Since July 2023, Goodman’s organization has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars exposing testing on cats, dogs and monkeys—specifically in the Cleveland area, when it bought billboards lambasting the Biden administration for allowing such testing to occur. (“Mr. President, Save Us,” a billboard around Cleveland read, showing a cat staring down Biden.)

The advocacy group’s investigations and ad dollars shed light on a series of sometimes heinous testing, from VAs in Los Angeles to St. Louis and Raleigh, N.C. One study hinted at the installation of pacemakers in 54 dogs, as to manufacture and measure “extra heartbeats.” “Most [of the dogs] will be euthanized,” federal documents showed, according to WCWP’s Freedom of Information Act request.

In a statement provided to media after the August 9 announcement, a VA spokesperson said that the department overall, like the one in Cleveland, has been “proactively” reducing studies on “sensitive species” in order to benefit Veterans suffering from, say, strokes or heart disease.

This year’s budget bill for the Department as a whole, signed March 9, vowed to eliminate all testing with sensitive species—cats, dogs, monkeys—by 2026, and within 90 days for Cleveland’s hospital.

“VA is fully complying with the law,” the spokesperson wrote. “There is no feline testing happening at this facility or any other.”

Regardless of the apparent victory for animal rights activists, heartbeat-related tests involving dogs are slated for projects in Richmond, Virginia; Madison, Wisconsin; and San Diego, the VA’s website lists.

“VA continues to be committed to supporting the research that is needed to improve medical care for Veterans, and recognizes that a very small portion of that research currently still depends on work with sensitive species of animals,” its research page reads. “VA is also committed to continuing to reduce the need for sensitive species of animals to be involved in VA research.”

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