US ends animal testing programme 'that saw dead cats fed to kittens'

PA

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has announced it will stop using cats for food safety research, following public outcry at the practice labelled “kitten cannibalism”.

The USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) had been using kittens to research toxoplasmois, a potentially fatal parasitic disease often caught from contaminated food.

At eight weeks old, the kittens were fed raw meat infected with the T. gondii parasite. Their faeces were then collected for up to three weeks to harvest eggs for use in food safety experiments.

Cat meat was allegedly used for the testing as they were the only host animal in which infection could complete its life cycle.

A report published last month by anti-animal testing organisation The White Coat Project (WCWP) said that as recently as 2015, the USDA had bought dead dogs, cats and other animals from meat markets in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and fed their body parts to the lab-bred cats as part of the research.

More than 3,000 kittens have been put down since the programme was launched in 1982, the WCWP found, with the programme costing more than £17m.

“These healthy kittens—who briefly pass the parasite’s eggs and become immune within weeks—are then killed and incinerated by USDA because they are no longer useful,” the report states.

The report was met with widespread outcry across social media and within the American Congress.

In March, Congress introduced new bipartisan legislation, known as the Kitten Act, to end the practice, describing it as "taxpayer-funded kitten slaughter".

In a statement on Tuesday, the USDA announced: "toxoplasmosis research has been redirected and the use of cats has been discontinued and will not be reinstated".

The agency also announced that the remaining 14 cats in its labs would be adopted by USDA employees.

California Democratic Representative Jimmy Panetta, who co-sponsored the House bill, applauded the move, writing in a statement that the USDA had "listened responded appropriately to our concerns."

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