Trump may be about to sign the death sentence of the National Institute of Health, and, by extension, the Office of Lab Animal Welfare.
He gutted research animal protections.
Any vertebrate that isn't a mammal will have no rights.
Neither will mice or rats.
If NIH grants are stopped, researchers can't pay anyone. They can't perform research. They can't pay for veterinary services.
They won't be required to provide veterinary services.
The only medical research that will happen will be self funded by big pharma, and they can torture the animals and skew all the lab results that they want.
Just like Musk did to the primates in his neuralink research.
I don't know what's going to happen to me or anyone else at the university where I work. My job is to make sure the animals are treated humanely and to provide veterinary care. I'm especially scared about what's going to happen to those research animals if veterinary staff gets laid off. The USDA only covers mammals, and it doesn't even cover all of them. Every rat I've ever made a tiny paper gift box full of marshmallows for, every mouse I've ever watched grow up, every rodent I've ever separated from an aggressive dominant brother and then treated their tiny wounds, they have no protections if NIH goes down. Decades of research into humane handling, euthanasia, and animal behavior will be tossed aside and wasted.
Please, do everything you can. Protest. Contact your representatives. Anything you can do. Do it for science, for medicine, for people's lives, for people's jobs, and for the animals.
Edit: thank you to everyone who's spreading this, but please reblog the updated reblog that I have pinned to my profile. The NIH is no longer frozen, but "indirect expenses" limits is just as big a threat to lab animal welfare, scientific integrity, and people's jobs as an NIH freeze.
