Petition: Tell the EPA to Reinstate Plan to End Animal Tests and Retire Bunnies

A new investigation by the White Coat Waste Project (WCW) has exposed how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has canceled its historic plans to phase out all barbaric testing on mammals by 2035 and retire rabbits from its labs. 

According to documents obtained by WCW, the EPA has quietly canceled its 2019 plan to stop wasteful testing on mammals and “stripped out” the benchmarks set by former EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler to reduce the agency’s testing on mammals by 30% by 2025 and completely by 2035. WCW previously documented that the EPA abused and killed as many as 20,000 animals each year for its cruel and deadly in-house experiments where animals were electroshocked and forced to inhale diesel exhaust.

Internal EPA emails obtained by WCW also show the EPA has ditched former Administrator Wheeler’s 2021 plan prompted by WCW to retire lab rabbits and is now senselessly killing them instead.

Source: WhiteCoatWaste/YouTube

During his confirmation hearing in early 2021, Wheeler’s replacement and current EPA head Michael Regan promised Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) under oath that he would “remain strongly committed” to cutting animal testing. But within months of taking office, his team refused to retire bunnies and began to dismantle the animal testing phase-out plan. 

WCW has now uncovered that the EPA is continuing to waste tax money on more animal tests, including firing guns and forcing mice to breathe the smoke emitted and other tests that entail locking rats in hot cages, feeding them high-fat diets, and pumping the cages full of harmful smoke meant to simulate a wildfire. 

Polls show that a supermajority of taxpayers—Democrats and Republicans alike—oppose the EPA’s inhumane animal testing. The agency’s senseless about-face undoes years of work by WCW, taxpayers, and Congress to end the EPA’s wasteful and cruel animal tests and spare the survivors.

Please sign this petition to tell Congress to direct the EPA to reinstate its plans to phase out animal testing and retire rabbits!

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