Taxpayer dollars fund billions in wasteful animal experiments—Justin Goodman of White Coat Waste Project reveals the shocking truth. In this episode, learn how government labs torture animals with little human benefit, and discover ways to fight back for ethical, effective science.
What if your taxes were funding billions in cruel, ineffective animal experiments with near-zero benefit to human health?
In this eye-opening episode of Puppies, Pandemics, and Public Health, host Dr. Johnny Lieberman talks with Justin Goodman, Senior Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy at White Coat Waste Project, about the hidden world of government-funded animal testing. With over 20 years in advocacy, Justin exposes how agencies like NIH, FDA, and DOD waste $20 billion annually on experiments that fail to translate to humans—often with 95% failure rates. From beagle vocal cord surgeries to primate sepsis tests and potential COVID origins in U.S.-funded Wuhan labs, Justin details campaigns that have shut down facilities and saved animals.
He emphasizes shifting to human-relevant research, adopting lab survivors, and using tools like FOIA to drive change. Whether you're concerned about ethics, public health, or fiscal waste, this episode uncovers why taxpayer accountability is key—and how you can help end the cycle.
Top 3 Takeaways
About the Guest – Justin Goodman, MA
Justin Goodman is the Senior Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy at non-profit government watchdog White Coat Waste. For more than 20 years, Justin has led high-profile, winning grassroots and lobbying campaigns to expose and end billions in wasteful and cruel taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs, cats, primates and other animals. Justin’s work has been covered by all major media outlets and awarded by the American Association of Political Consultants, LUSH Cosmetics, and others.
Website: https://www.whitecoatwaste.org
About the Show
Puppies, Pandemics, and Public Health explores the intersection of animal welfare, public policy, and human health. Hosted by Dr. Johnny Lieberman, each episode invites changemakers, legal experts, and health advocates to shed light on what really impacts our communities—and what we can do about it.
About the Host
Dr. Johnny Lieberman is a physician, public health advocate, and lifelong animal lover with a passion for connecting the dots between animal welfare, human behavior, and the systems that shape our lives. With a background in both medicine and public health policy, Johnny brings a unique lens to conversations about how our treatment of animals impacts human health, the environment, and social justice.
In Puppies, Pandemics, and Public Health, Johnny brings warmth, curiosity, and a dash of wit to tough conversations that matter. From exposing the realities of factory farming to uncovering the links between zoonotic diseases and our food systems, his goal is to empower listeners to be informed, compassionate, and engaged citizens—while still keeping it real (and sometimes bringing in puppies).
Whether he's discussing legislative loopholes or snuggling his rescue dog between recordings, Dr. Lieberman believes that creating a healthier world starts with how we treat its most vulnerable beings.
[00:00:00] Justin Goodman is a senior Vice president of advocacy and public policy at nonprofit government watchdog white coat waste. For over 20 years, Justin has led high profile winning grassroots and lobbying campaigns to expose and end billions in wasteful and cruel taxpayer funded experiments on dogs, cats, primates, and other animals.
Justin's work has been covered by all major media outlets and awarded by the American Association of Political Consultants, lush Cosmetics, and others.
Justin, thank you so much for joining us. It's great to be here, doc.
if there were one point you wanted to get across to our listening audience today that's most important that we don't want to miss talking about, what would that be? The thing people have to realize is that the US government, not private companies or cosmetics companies. Are the single largest [00:01:00] funder of animal testing, not only in this country, but in the world.
About $20 billion a year is wasted by our US government on animal testing. About two thirds of all animal testing in this country is paid for with our tax dollars by agencies like the National Institutes of Health, the FDA, the Department of Defense. So when we're looking to strike at the root of the problem and disrupt this horrific.
Wasteful industry. It really has to start with going to the source. And that is the US government. And what's great about that is that all of us, any citizen across this country who pays taxes and has a member of Congress, has a voice and can weigh in, tell the government they don't want their money spent this way.
Great. I think that's a great summary, Justin, of what I hope we can cover today and share with the public. I know some of what I learned about what you just said came from white coat waste and it opened my eyes a [00:02:00] little bit. We'll get into this in terms of some of the experiments going on, but one point that Justin highlighted is it's our taxpayer dollars.
Yours, mine, Justin's. we should have some say in how our money is getting spent and as a physician. I am just appalled at the vast amounts of money being flushed down the toilet on experiments that have close to a 0% chance of even yielding anything of human benefit, which is the target for a lot of this research.
the narrative needs to change, which is part of what I hope I can do.
There's a narrative out there, and after I'm done speaking, perhaps you can address that as well, that I feel like from the medical community is that we can't stop spending on research. We're curing cancer, we're coming up with life saving treatments every day, and [00:03:00] that's the narrative out there. And even as a scientist, as an md, I am in a tiny minority of people who feel like that's not the right narrative, is what I'm saying on point, Justin, or are you and I in the extreme minority and we're missing the boat somehow?
That there's all this life saving stuff being done every day, and we can't stop experimenting on animals. what would you like to share and try and either adapt that narrative, correct it, or bring in another viewpoint to maybe help inform the public. No, I think you're exactly right.
You know, animal testing is bad science, but it's big business. $20 billion a year is a lot of money and there's been industries and careers. Built around torturing animals and experiments, even if they don't have any benefit for those animals or for public health more broadly. And you don't have to look any further than what these agencies themselves say for decades.
The National Institutes of Health, the largest fund of animal testing in the world. The Food and Drug Administration, the [00:04:00] Department of Defense, have been lamenting the fact that animal testing is such a poor predictor of what happens in humans, yet they continue to throw billions of dollars at it, and it's not because it has a good return on investment for taxpayers.
It's because there are individuals and institutions and businesses that are built around torturing animals and experiments, and the only people benefiting are the ones lining their pockets where our tax dollars. When you see the pushback for my efforts, for example, with white coat waste on Capitol Hill colleges and universities, professors, companies that breed puppies and kittens and poor primates, these are the people pushing back.
The people who are getting rich or torturing animals are the ones that want to continue. In general, people across this country of all political stripes don't support animal testing. They see it as an outdated, archaic, and cruel. Practice yet it continues because it's heavily subsidized by the [00:05:00] federal government.
And not only is it subsidized by the federal government to the 200 billions of dollars a year, also, some of the testing that isn't even paid for with tax dollars is mandated by agencies like the Food and Drug Administration or the EPA. So again, when you, follow the money and you go to the root of these problems, it's bad government policy and wasteful spending that's behind.
Most of the atrocities are happening to animals and laboratories, and that's why I like to say to people, animal testing isn't a scientific problem to solve. It's an economic, and it's a policy problem to solve. If you cut all the funding for animal testing tomorrow, you can bet your ass that people are gonna figure out another way to do things.
But the problem is that even, efforts to, promote the use of alternatives or NAMS or whatever you want to call them. So many of them predicate ending animal tests on alternatives when animal tests are a fraud and failure to begin with. And animals shouldn't have to wait in laboratories until there's some quote unquote, alternative developed.
Because if they do, they're gonna be waiting forever and they're [00:06:00] not gonna get out of laboratories alive. And I know, our position on this at White Coat Waste is different than a lot of the big organizations working on this issue. Who are promoting NAMS and thinks that's a solution.
But there have been alternatives to animal testing since the eighties. Yet there's more animals laboratories than there ever were before. I think a good analogy is veggie burgers. We have the best veggie burgers that have ever existed in history that are completely indistinguishable from real meat.
You have more people eating meat , they're eating more meat, and more animals are being killed on farms . So there's a disconnect. You know, technology is not gonna solve everything. That industry, like animal testing, is very heavily subsidized, and that's why these industries continue to thrive.
It's not because there's real free market demand for them and that they're paying dividends to the customers or the taxpayers. It's because the government is artificially propping them up. So our approach is take the government down the equation, let Bill Gates or private pharmaceutical companies fund animal testing if they want to.
I can guarantee you that they're [00:07:00] not gonna pay for so much of the stupid stuff that the government is funding, like injecting beagles with cocaines scaring monkeys with toy spiders, There's just no way anyone's gonna pay for that if the government isn't. So if we want to change the face of this issue as we know it, we have to cut the funding and we can't wait until the government decides that those alternatives.
In many cases, we don't need them. And in many cases we'll never have them and animals just can't wait for that. That's a great summary and a couple of points there. I just wanted to highlight it's about the money, as long as the checks keep getting written to scare monkeys with spiders or stick an electrode up their urethra to electroshock their penis, to make them ejaculate or other in insane torturous drilling holes in their heads and burning parts of their brain.
Yes. These are really experiments that our taxpayer dollars are funding. So that's part of the narrative, which I'm trying to change here with Justin's help, [00:08:00] is that it's extremely wasteful, it's extremely barbaric, and on top of that, it's not yielding results. Not only is it not a good investment, Justin, of our taxpayer dollars or our time for our scientists, I'll go further.
It's a terrible investment. we did this for the past 20 years. You haven't yielded anything of value. That's fine. We're gonna keep writing the checks.
The smart money realizes that experimenting on animals is the past and a more cost effective way.
And as I like the term you said, human relevant way for experimenting is not animals. And so not only are we losing billions of dollars of research money, which could be invested in. Research methods that actually might get a cure, a safe treatment more quickly than experimenting on a genetically inbred group of rats,
It's just so horribly [00:09:00] inefficient, and we're not just losing money, we're losing time.
It's called opportunity cost is a huge part of it. For every 10 billion that we spend on. Experimenting on animals and every 10 years, that doesn't yield a result. That's a terrible investment. That's money that could be invested elsewhere on more human relevant experiments.
So I wanted to bring that up and help change the narrative. they're doing life saving critical research every day. It's wasteful. It's torturous and there are better alternatives. Yeah. And the problem is you know, to your point. And what we've been talking about, there's no incentive to innovate and there's no incentive to do something else because the checks keep coming for the animal tests and actually the checks go away.
If you solve the problem, then the checks stop. You know, if you cure a disease, you stop getting paid to sign the cure. And that's part of the problem here is not only are they not curing it, they're never going to cure it. [00:10:00] Animal experiments in virtually every case are gonna fail To derive the outcome that is being promised in terms of a cure for people.
So there's job security there and saying, I'm gonna develop an animal model that in the back of my mind, I honestly know is never going to work, but I'm gonna be able to get paid by the government for 50 years to do it. So even if there are, non-animal methods, alternatives, whatever you wanna call them available, unless you cut the funding for the animal tests, they're not gonna get used and they won't be fully utilized, at least by.
Scientists and scientific organizations and universities and colleges that could benefit from them. 'cause they're getting paid to do the animal testing. And you even see this with private pharmaceutical companies. Number one, a lot of them don't wanna do animal testing because it is very slow, very expensive and very ineffective.
But the FDA historically has forced them to do it. Anyway, and you have companies like Van De Pharmaceuticals based here near Washington, DC that's been pushing back, fighting with the FDA filing lawsuits [00:11:00] against the FDA to stop the FDA from forcing this company to poison dogs, eagle puppies, and tests that they know are gonna be completely useless determining the safety or efficacy of their drugs.
But as long as the FDA keeps telling drug makers, they have to do it. Drug makers that are investing up to a billion dollars in a drug, they're going to, because that's their only pathway to get approval. And not only is the government mandating it, in some cases, we've been exposing them. In a lot of cases, the government is paying for the pharmaceutical companies, animal tests on dogs, primates rats, mice, and other animals.
So the government is forcing 'em to do the test. Then the government is footing the bill for the test. These companies, if they're successful, laugh all the way to the bank because the government foot the bill for all the experimentation to get them there. And of course, most cases, that's gonna fail. So it's a big black hole of money that we're never gonna see any benefit from.
So yeah, the system is incredibly corrupt, in which, it's frustrating that. We have [00:12:00] leadership now at some agencies like the National Institutes of Health that are predating animal testing, cuts on alternatives or future availability alternatives with kind of a blank check until then, because we know given behavior and you have to incentivize the switch from animal testing, either ending it completely or moving to something else, replacing it.
And without that incentive, the incentive is cutting the funding for animal testing and forcing them to do something else. And unless you do that. They're not going to. And we've seen that for the last 50 years, that better technology has become available, but more animals are being killed in laboratories.
And again, it's not 'cause it's good science, It's because a lot of people are financially benefiting you know, building careers on it, getting accolades for it. Publishing papers, there's billion dollar companies that literally exist just to breed animals, dogs, cats, primates, mites, rats by the tens of millions.
To be experimented on. So there's a lot of people that stand to benefit and typically they've had the loudest voice on Capitol Hill. [00:13:00] Now the current administration is a little more skeptical of spending, it's a little more skeptical of science. It's a little more skeptical of the traditional talking points from these companies that animal testing is, you know, quote unquote necessary, and that we have to keep doing it.
They want to cut. Some of these agencies are not being aggressive enough and almost kind of drinking the Kool-Aid about, well, we can't end animal testing until we have alternatives. But some agencies, like the DOD have been cutting contracts for animal testing overnight, showing it that it can be done.
There just has to be the political will to do it. Yeah, So much of the research being done on animals yields nothing What's the number quoted Justin? It's greater than 90%, probably greater than 95. Does that sound about right? Yeah. Of treatments and drugs that are effective in animal tests fail in human trials, and that represents every single drug that fails in a human represents decades. Of waste of time and a billion or more dollars thousands of animals and patients who are left [00:14:00] suffering, given false hope by the NIH or by the animal experimenters saying, oh, we had a breakthrough in mines. We're just around the corner. If we just get this much more funding. We're gonna get the answer. you know, look at HIV.
We don't have an HIV vaccine, but people like Anthony Fauci promised since the eighties that if we just torture enough monkeys and chimps, we're gonna have an HIV vaccine. We don't have one half a century later. And that's true cancer. So many disease areas, both rare and more common diseases, Alzheimer's, where they continually develop these animal models that are miraculous .
And we're Curing them. Then they completely fail in people. And some of these vaccines, HIV vaccines that have passed trials and monkeys and been safe and effective, actually made humans more susceptible in trials to getting HIV not less. So the results in addition to being ineffective in some cases are disastrous and deadly.
The results of animal experimentation, the consequences can be absolutely devastating [00:15:00] for patients, for public health, for global health, and we've seen the worst case scenario play out the FBI, the Department of Energy, the CIA and other federal agencies believe that the most likely cause of the COVID Pandemic was a lab lead.
Yet, as you and I have discussed quite a bit, we haven't really learned. From our mistakes and places like Colorado State University are looking to build new BAT labs to do this type of dangerous research on US soil this time with funding from the National Institutes of Health. So again, this is all about money.
The people at Colorado State who have been doing these bat experiments for something like 20 years, they haven't accomplished a single thing to improve human health, but they've raked in millions and millions of dollars to their university and ultimately. That's what matters to them. It doesn't matter that they're tormenting animals.
It doesn't matter that they're wasting our tax dollars. It doesn't matter to them that they even might create a new virus or unleash a virus that didn't exist here before on US soil. So the consequences can be devastating. It is about waste, but we've [00:16:00] also seen the worst case scenario play out where it could be absolutely devastating and deadly.
Thank you. Those are all, some really salient points
thanks for bringing all that up. And part Of what I think is one of the many points that you brought up along the lines of incentivization. Lost dollars and lost time. Right. As a physician, I rely on research to practice medicine,
one of the current narratives out there I think there needs to be a giant asterisk after that statement. Nobody can argue that there have been research studies which have been groundbreaking as a result of animal testing, going back decades.
Animal research. Part of the other caveat in the Astro 'cause it has also cost lives. As Justin brought up some of the points, there have been numerous examples as an infectious disease physician.
There have been antibiotics which came out, approved to be safe and effective in animals, got prescribed, written to patients and they were disastrous.
[00:17:00] you can go to public websites, N-I-H-F-D-A, and on there they're talking about the lack of predictability and the lack of utility of animal research.
Yet there's still a giant disconnect in us getting there and getting away from it. Look it up on your own. It's not like we are just making it up. It's out there in the public domain. Look it up, and if that's something that resonates with you, speak to your friends, your colleagues about it. Maybe speak to your lawmaker.
Hey, this is not consistent with my values. Maybe, you know, someone who's suffering from a disease that they're waiting for a cure on or a treatment. And there might be a better way to do it. Torturing rats or drilling holes into monkey skulls or, infecting dogs or bats on purpose.
There probably is a better way. So look into that on your own. Everything we've said again is factual. Perhaps that's gonna change the way you [00:18:00] think about the critical need for animal research, which is really a false narrative in my opinion. Yeah, and it is all a result of. Credentialed people abusing their authority and fearmongering and telling people they're gonna die, their relatives are gonna die.
People around the world are gonna die if we don't torture animals. That has never been true, and it's certainly not true now. And you know, we have all kinds of examples over the last nine years of work that White Coat Waste has been doing on its campaigns. Where we cut animal experiments, we cut funding for animal experiments.
We restricted funding for certain animal experiments, and they just went away. someone else didn't pick up the tab. They were not revived. They just ended from nicotine testing on monkeys that the FDA was doing. We exposed it, got under the Trump administration actually got them to shut it down.
Retired to monkey use cannibalism experiments on kittens where they were USDA staff. Were literally flying to wet markets in China and other countries buying dog and cat meat. Flying it back to the United [00:19:00] States and their carry on luggage and force feeding it to kittens and cannibalism experiments for toxoplasmosis.
and most recently, the Department of Defense, after an investigation we did, began cutting all of its contracts for experiments on cats and dogs that they were funding all over the world, including one project where they were shoving marbles up, cat's butts, and then electro shocking them. For constipation experiments.
And that project had received a $10 million in funding from the Department of Defense. And the second we flagged it for them and they were made aware of it, they cut it. And that's not gonna start up again. No one else is gonna pay for that. So our kind of model following the money.
Our motto is, stop the money, stop the madness. Because when you look at the problem, the source of the problem, it's why it's persisted so long, it comes back to all the people. Financially benefiting from doing it. It doesn't come down to it being good science or lifesaving or anything like that.
It comes down to businesses and individuals and institutions like colleges and universities that [00:20:00] are literally taking billions of our tax dollars a year to continue this. And they want this. They get to stay on and the money to keep flowing and they're not gonna stop until the money is cut. And that's why.
I kind of think it's a fool's errand in most cases, to go after laboratories that have already been established and individual experimenters have already cast their checks. They have their money, they have the animals, and there's really no incentive for them to stop at that point, which is why we go to the root of the problem and try to get language in federal spending bills every year to say, NIH, we're gonna give you X amount of dollars, but it can't be spent on.
Experiments on dogs, cats, and primates. and we work on standalone legislation like the PAW Act, like the Primates Act, like the Puppers Act, all these great names we've come up with for bills that would cut funding for certain areas of animal experimentation, or cut funding for college and universities that continue to experiment on dogs and cats or other animals.
And we work with everybody. This is a great [00:21:00] bipartisan issue, especially during such a politically divisive time. We're able to unite folks on the left, the right, and the center around these issues. The Paw Act that Congresswoman Nancy Mac recently reintroduced the Preventing Animal Abuse and Waste Act to defund painful experiments on dogs and cats by the NIH.
Very bipartisan bill. I work with members from the very conservative Freedom Caucus to the very progressive squad and really. Are able to unite a very diverse group of stakeholders, both on Capitol Hill in DC and the grassroots to let the government know they don't want their money wasted on these horrendous animal experiments.
And we're making a lot of progress. This issue is high politics now. The president, the first family agency heads are talking about it and prioritizing the issue. And we are in a rare moment right now where we do have leadership in this government. Who wants to ravage the NIH and reform the NIH dramatically.
And the reason they [00:22:00] gave for that in the presidential budget this year, the reason they gave for wanting to cut the NIH budget by 40% is because what we exposed in Wuhan, the gain of function experiments that likely caused COVID. And that was kind of the shining example of the poster child for waste, fraud and abuse in the NIH is funding experiments unaccountable laboratory overseas that.
Likely unleashed a pandemic that killed millions of people. So that's caused a lot of people to rethink what are we funding at the NIH, what are the consequences of what we're funding? In some cases, they could be devastating. In many cases they're wasteful. But we can't just keep writing these blank checks to laboratories and hoping for the best.
We have to be more critical about how our money is being spent. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for Highlighting that all. And. How We spend our money is huge. It should be important to everybody and the government keeps writing the checks. This would be a terrible investment for a private investor.
And that's kind of another [00:23:00] way to look at it. As you mentioned I think private companies, pharmaceutical companies, philanthropists who wanna advance treatments, I think they realize they don't wanna spend 10 billion of their money. On something that has an extremely low probability of building a result and that's gonna lead to a profit.
It's a terrible business model. if you look at it from an investment standpoint. If you told someone there's close to a 0% chance, you're going to even break even much less make money on this, who's gonna sign up for that? Nobody. But that's essentially what we're doing. Is we're wasting time.
We're flushing dollars down the toilet for something that might yield a result, but at what cost? At what cost to dollars, at what cost to time that smart people are spending looking at things that could be doing it elsewhere and at what cost to our morality. The experiments being done, especially on some of the animals which we bring into [00:24:00] our homes, I think.
That's something a lot of the public doesn't realize. It's not just rats and mice that are being experimented on, although those make up a majority, I think it might horrify people who aren't aware of this issue to hear that dogs and cats are being experimented on every day and they're being bred on purpose just.
To live that miserable life in a cold, barren, filthy cage Justin, how common are experiments on dogs and cats these days?
I think that most people don't even realize they're really going on. certainly before I got down this path, I didn't realize it was anything that common,
So do you have any examples? You mentioned the horrible one about marbles being shoved up the rectum of cats for constipation. Are there any other examples which. Without going into too much [00:25:00] detail, but might shed some light and open the eyes for the public to make 'em think like this is unacceptable.
Yeah, absolutely. And this is one of the reasons we work on old species . We're working with the EPA right now to adopt out rats and fish from experiments that we exposed. So we kind of work on the whole animal kingdom in terms of trying to end these horrible and wasteful experiments on them.
But we prioritize. Campaigns on dogs and cats. 'cause I think this is where we can find common ground with people across this country who may not be that. most people are very busy. They have lots of priorities, pulling them in different directions. They have families, they have work. And we're lucky if they could.
And you know, you're bombarded with different messages and advertisements all over social media. How can we break through with a message and an issue that will grab people's attention, capture their imagination, and ultimately get them to take some kind of action. And unfortunately , yeah, there isn't sympathy for mice and rats, even though there's probably close to a hundred million of them in US [00:26:00] laboratories and they suffer incredibly.
And we've had a lot of success ending experiments on them. But what really connects with people, of course, to your point, is experimentation on dogs and cats because people consider them members of the family. I think people like them more than the human members of their family in a lot of cases.
And, so that's A great way to find common ground with everyone across this country, regardless of their political affiliation or background in any way. Everyone has some kind of sympathy for cats and dogs, or compassion or love for cats and dogs. And unfortunately, there's over 40,000 dogs in 10,000 cats still locked in US laboratories being used in horrible experiments, mostly funded with our tax dollars.
So giving kittens heart failure surgically. Inducing heart attacks in dogs and forcing them to run on treadmills. Injecting dogs with cocaine poisoning dogs with experimental drugs, increasingly large doses to see what doses make them sick or die. There's breeding programs at colleges and universities across this country that are fully [00:27:00] funded by the US government to breed puppies and kittens specifically intentionally.
To suffer, from genetic disorders, from crippling diseases. Blindness, just horrible, you know, these kitten and puffy mills across this country that we're paying for just to breed sick animals to be tortured and experimented on. And, I think you were describing it, it's sad that these animals.
All they know is pain and terror. When they live in these labs, they've never seen the sky. They never touch grass. They live alone in these tiny cages. The only time they see people is when they're coming in to torture them. And they are just sitting in pain constantly wondering when the next time someone's gonna come in and torture them is, and that's their whole life until they die or they're killed.
And that's a life for over 50,000, I think it's probably close to 60,000 combined dogs and cats laboratories right now. We've been prioritizing efforts, obviously to cut the funding for that and stop the government from mandating it. So the government is all, paying for those experiments on [00:28:00] dogs at colleges and universities and pharmaceutical companies and also mandating some of that testing .
So that's a top priority for us. And also the issue of primates. You know, that's how I got my store over 20 years ago, was working on, ending successfully and doing experiment on primates at my university, the University of Connecticut, back in 2004, 2005. And there's still 105,000 primates in US laboratories being used in painful experiments where they're not even provided any pain relief being infected with Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers.
being infected with HIV like diseases and just let the virus run its course and kill them slowly. Painfully, and invasive brain experiments where they're drilling into these animals' brains causing brain damage surgically or with acid, and then just observing the effects of it. Monkeys being forced to gamble through a sip of water, being injected with cocaine, methamphetamines, heroin, fentanyl, just all manners of ridiculous abuses being visited on these animals at our expense.[00:29:00]
And if you ask most people. They say this is not how they want their money spent. This is not how they want animals treated. And our policies and the way the government spends our money ultimately should be a reflection of our values. And there's a lot of disagreement about the direction of this country and the role of the government.
But most people, democrat, independent Republican, vegetarian, libertarian, agree that we shouldn't be torturing animals and useless experiments. So there's more public sentiment in our favor than ever. we just have to. Do what we can to translate that into public policy changes and changes in how the government spends its money.
And we're doing that. Obviously all of this happens more slowly than we'd like it to. But things are moving in the right direction. And which is why we also wanna capitalize again on the moment we have right now in Washington where there is the appetite to dramatically reform some of these agencies.
And maybe, you know, if we're effective and successful, we're gonna direct as much of that. Energy possible into scrutinizing and cutting [00:30:00] programs that are hurting animals and laboratories. Wow. that's a lot. Justin, I wanted to highlight a couple of things on what you said. Just as you were talking about the dogs and cats.
Dogs is what got me into this fight. just listening to you talk about that, I have a rescue dog and I felt it what you're talking about, and that's something I would ask the public. Can you imagine your dog or cat being taken away and forced to live every single day, being experimented on and tortured every single day of their life and then killed at the end?
Does that not inspire some emotion in you? Are these. Dogs often the highly docile beagle breed as one of the most common ones. not entitled to a life similar to the life that your pet has? Does that not strike a nerve in you and make you want to learn more and maybe take some action to say, this is unacceptable?
[00:31:00] I mean, it does. For me. That's part of why I'm here. I agree with everything Justin said about. Rats and mice deserve better treatment as well, and I support all the work being done to try and stop torturing them for pointless experiments. That may be a stretch for some people, but dogs and cats, the people that sleep in their bed, jump up on the couch with them and watch tv.
Perhaps if you're like me, you actually prepare your dog's food. But hopefully that strikes an a nerve with you and makes you say, what's the cost of what we're doing? Not even the financial cost, the human morality cost.
And many people do consider dogs and cats as you brought up family members. Some people consider pigs and chickens, family members as well.
I just want you to think about that. That struck me. Helps motivate me is that issue. I have a dog in my house. Many people listening may share their home with an animal. And think about that as you think, if you're going to change the way you think about the [00:32:00] spending of federal dollars and the investment of time and money to experiment on animals, is that consistent with your values?
That's something to think about. Yeah. And that's, you know, one of the most effective. Advocacy tools we have in our toolbox is I go to Capitol Hill and meet with house members, senate members, Republicans and Democrats, people in the administration, and we bring Beagles rescued from laboratories up to Capitol Hill with us as ambassadors to make this issue personal.
And you know, like you were describing, beagles are the breed of choice in laboratories and grant applications and contracts. The NIH website even says this, that beagles are chosen for the most foolish reason. It's because they're small and they're docile and they're friendly and they don't fight back, so they're easy to abuse.
So all the qualities that make them great pets are used against them by these experimenters, and that breaks people's hearts when not only hear about it, certainly it's upsetting to even hear about, [00:33:00] but to actually meet one of these sweet beagles who had to endure that and came out the other end and was able to adapt.
And have a relatively happy life.
And we've gotten lots of dogs, cats, primates and other animals out of government laboratories and other taxpayer fund laboratories into sanctuaries and loving homes. And we also work on legislation to require that if these government agencies are funding animal experimentation, they have policies that allow animals.
To be adopted out instead of just killed and tossed away like trash, which is what is the standard and has been the standard for a long time. And that's slowly changing. but we're trying to shut down as many labs and save as many survivors as possible. And I've been very grateful, of course, for your.
Support and collaboration on these efforts. You know, over the past couple years working on op-eds together, research and other things, and lending your voice as a medical expert and someone who's say in that community saying, no more. This is not good for any of us. It's not good for animals. It's not good for patients, it's not good for public [00:34:00] health, and hopefully doing this podcast will embolden more people in your position to lend their credentials and credibility to fighting the good fight.
Thanks, Justin. That's certainly part of my intent here. so hopefully we've shared some important information here. Give you some more to think about and perhaps you'll be interested in changing the way you think and perhaps taking some action. Justin, if we shared some information and changed some minds during the show here.
How can people get in touch with you? So it seems like you, already got the wheels in motion, you're making stuff happen, and if people wanna reach out and learn how they can make a difference themselves, either joining your effort or just making different choices on their own how can they get in touch with you?
My coat waste. So our website, white coat waste.org, it's currently being revamped, so it's pretty bare bones right now, but you can join our mailing list and make a donation on there. And also at White Coat Waste on all of the social media platforms. [00:35:00] Wherever you're, a member following, click the like button, share our content.
And if you join our mailing list or follow on social, you'll see lots of opportunities to write Members of Congress, call the White House, call different federal agencies and make your voice heard. Great. That's outstanding information. Justin, thanks for this discussion. I think we've gone through a lot of important topics here, and please, if you like this, please share it.
thank you Justin, so much for your time. I really appreciate all your thoughts, your opinions, the insightful information you've brought to the show.
Thank you for everything. Thanks for having me.