Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has released another edition of his annual Festivus Report, aimed at exposing the federal government’s misuse of taxpayer dollars.
This year’s report sheds light on a particularly disturbing aspect of government spending: barbaric experiments on animals, including cats, conducted with funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Defense (DOD).
The report details $1.5 million in taxpayer funds used for cruel experiments at the University of Pittsburgh, funded through an NIH grant. These experiments involve torturous treatment of young kittens, ostensibly to study motion sickness.
The report describes horrifying procedures, including:
Electroshock therapy causing uncontrollable vomiting. Spinning kittens on hydraulic tables to induce severe motion sickness. Drilling holes in their skulls and removing parts of their brains, leaving the animals alive but cognitively impaired.
The experiments, conducted on kittens as young as four months old, are brutal. The kittens are first trained to endure long periods of restraint, tied down for hours over several weeks to prepare them for the procedures.
Once “trained,” they are strapped to hydraulic tables that spin them rapidly to induce extreme disorientation. If the spinning doesn’t make them vomit, researchers inject copper