This week I will be enlightening you all on something different from what I usually do. This piece of animal welfare directly has to do with the United States Government. In this past year, the KITTEN Act, or Kittens in Traumatic Testing Ends Now Act, was introduced into Congress, and although it never was formally passed, it sheds light on issues within governmental agencies when it comes to the wellbeing of animals.

Fig. 1 Actual Images of Two of the Cats at the Experimentation Facility

Since 1982, the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) has been performing experiments on kittens concerning food-borne illnesses. They purposefully bred cats and fed young kittens contaminated food, causing them to become ill. They then studied the effects and euthanized the kittens afterward despite them would have been able to fully recover and live out relatively full lives. There were also allegations that the research forced the cats to be subjected to cannibalism.

USDA administrators have confirmed that over 2000 cats had been used in this experiment since it began in 1982 and has overall cost around 22 million dollars. They claimed that the kittens had to be euthanized because the food-borne bacteria could spread to humans, but this has been disproved and the likelihood of gaining the illness from the kitten is extremely low.

An investigation from the organization White Coat Waste Project initially discovered the tragic experiments and has been fighting against it ever since.

This past spring, the KITTEN Act was introduced to Congress calling for a stop to these experiments and prevention of future ones, and although not much came out of it legislation wise, the USDA declared on April 2^nd that they would cease all experimentation on cats, a big win for the KITTEN Act supporters.

Fig 2. Kitten Lady with Lawmakers Advocating for KITTEN Act

I first learned about this initiative through the Youtube channel Kitten Lady, whom I’ve mentioned before in previous blog posts. Hannah Shaw has done so much work for animal welfare and even visited congressmen at Capitol Hill specifically to promote the KITTEN Act. As a cat lover and someone with animal shelter experience, the thought of inhumanely experimenting on cats personally makes me sick to my stomach. Many people think that inhumane animal experimentation ended decades ago and seems like such an outdated commonplace, but it still happens, even in our own government. Intentionally breeding kittens only to slaughter them for little reason is completely ridiculous today, and personally I am glad that this Act had an impact and stopped theses dreadful experiments.

Experiments like this still happen today, and at least one of them has been stopped, but there might be more that we don’t even know about, so the fight is not over yet.