The title
of the report says it all, "USDA Kitten Cannibalism." It seems hard
to believe, but an investigation by a nonprofit watchdog group reveals that the
U.S. government purchased hundreds of cats and dogs for stomach-churning
research projects — projects that the watchdog group describes as
"needless."
The
research, carried out at the USDA's Agricultural Research Service's Animal
Parasitic Disease Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, included feeding the
remains of euthanized "meat market" animals to healthy lab cats and
injecting the remains of parasite-infected cats into mice, according
to NBC News, which acquired an early copy of the
reportreleased today (March. 19) by The White Coat Waste Project, a
group aimed at ending wasteful animal testing.
According
to NBC News, the investigation found that more than 400 dogs from Colombia,
Brazil and Vietnam, as well as 100 cats from China and Ethiopia, were
euthanized for lab food.
Apparently,
the lab also breeds kittens in order to carry out research on the parasite Toxoplasma
gondii; cats are the only host animal for the parasite's eggs. These cats were
fed brain or muscle tissue from intentionally infected cats. This month,
lawmakers announced they would introduce legislation to prevent the lab from infecting
cats with the parasite and then later euthanizing and incinerating those cats
after researchers collected the parasites from the animals' feces, according
to another NBC News report.
The
parasite T. gondii causes toxoplasmosis, which the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports as a leading cause of death
attributed to foodborne illness in the United States; humans can become
infected after consuming food or water contaminated with infected cat feces or
from eating undercooked meat of animals harboring cysts of the parasite in
their tissue, according to the CDC.
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