Cruel Kitten Experiments Canceled Following WCW Investigation; Over A Dozen Cats Rescued

Photos by: Kindness Ranch Animal Sanctuary 

In some hopeful news, the University of California-Davis (UC-Davis) has canceled plans for new kitten experiments, shut down its cat breeding colony, and retired 15 cats to the Kindness Ranch animal sanctuary in Hartville, Wyoming.

A Kindness Ranch social media post included photos of the rescued cats and stated, “Fifteen cats used for breeding and nutritional research at UC Davis have found their way to Kindness Ranch after the college reached out for help closing its doors on their breeding program.” The sanctuary wrote, “This collaboration between Kindness Ranch and UC Davis marks a critical turning point in how research institutions approach the use of animals in science. The decision to close their cat breeding program is a significant step toward more humane practices in the scientific community.”

The shuttering of UC-Davis’ cat breeding colony and the cats’ retirement comes three months after the non-profit White Coat Waste Project (WCW) announced that it prompted the cancellation of a new round of deadly kitten testing at the lab that intended to use animals from the school’s in-house colony.

The now-canceled study at UC-Davis, funded by more than $419,000 tax payer dollars from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), planned to infect at least 10 kittens from the colony with Toxoplasmosis by feeding them mouse brains and then killing them, according to public records obtained by WCW. The testing was scheduled to take place in 2024.

Following a WCW investigation that included Freedom of Information Act requests to UC-Davis and NIH earlier this year, UC-Davis halted plans for the cat testing and announced its intention to completely dismantle the cat colony it had maintained for decades to supply animals for cruel experiments.

WCW’s President Anthony Bellotti stated that the cancelation of the experiments and breeding program was a major accomplishment with far-reaching implications because UC-Davis supplied many other labs with cats, including UC-Irvine, the Smithsonian, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

“We’re proud that our investigation led to this important victory for cats and taxpayers,” said WCW’s Bellotti. “UC-Davis’s decision to scrap its kitten tests and close its breeding program will spare countless cats from pain and death at the expense of taxpayers in labs across the country.”

In 2019, Bellotti adopted two cats released from a U.S. government lab that WCW also stopped from conducting unnecessary toxoplasmosis experiments.