Immigrants aren't eating cats, but your taxes are funding cat torture

Last night, a viral meme made the jump from social media to the presidential debate stage when former President Trump repeated the already debunked story that illegal immigrants were stealing and eating Americans’ pets.

The rumor had propagated after Trump’s running-mate, JD Vance, began running with the narrative that Haitains in his home state of Ohio were scavenging yards for puppies and kittens.

Police in Springfield, Ohio, the alleged ground zero of this Caribbean-Cruella de Vil-hellscape, say they have had “no credible reports” of people harming pets. And reports from the Springfield News-Sun trace the conspiracy back, unsurprisingly, to a viral Facebook post in a local group where the author “claimed that their neighbor’s daughter’s friend” found a missing cat being carved up at a Haitian neighbor’s home.

We really might need to offer some media literacy classes for the Boomers on Facebook sometime soon.

These stories are overtly racist, pretty easily debunked, and a huge distraction from the real and pressing issues at hand in this country—immigration being one of them.

Furthermore, while immigrants have not been attacking cats and dogs our government actually has been, and they’ve been doing it with your tax dollars. Isn’t it funny how these kinds of stories always seem to fly under the radar, no matter how credible and documented they are?

The White Coat Waste Project, a taxpayer watchdog group dedicated to ending government-funded animal torture, recently revealed a new investigation showing the NIH spent $1,700,000 on heinous cat experiments. The funding was allocated to a collaboration between Georgia Tech and Russian labs to amputate the limbs off of the cats, replace them with prosthetics, electroshock their muscles, and then force them to walk on treadmills. The experiments run for a two year time period before the cats are ultimately killed and disposed of.

This is by no means an out of the ordinary finding by the organization. The NIH is the country’s single largest funder of cat torture, though by no means the only one. Earlier this year, the Department of Veterans Affairs ended its own multi-million, taxpayer-funded feline experimentation ring.

It’s worth knowing that the US government is actually the top funder of animal torture in the world and it’s all carried out with our tax dollars. As we’ve seen with the reckless use of money sent to Wuhan illegally for gain-of-function research leading up to COVID-19, many of these dollars end up in foreign labs with little oversight or accountability. A lot of those labs happen to be housed in the countries of some of our worst enemies, like China and Russia.

So, just to run all that back. We’re giving our tax dollars to countries that hate us. We’re allowing them to experiment on animals in ways that are frequently torturous and evade our own ethical standards for such experimentation. We have little oversight or accountability over these dollars or these experiments, creating dangerous conditions where diseases can be created, unleashed, and wreak havoc on the global population, or even worse, be intentionally weaponized against us. And we’re wasting billions of our tax dollars on this each year, billions of dollars Americans desperately need invested domestically.

All of this is happening right under our noses. But this isn’t what Trump got on that stage and talked about. It isn’t what his VP is discussing online. And it’s not what local GOP affiliates are renting billboards to rile the grassroots up about.

We’re becoming a deeply unserious country, and this is a great example of how and why.

Hannah is the Co-Founder and President of BASEDPolitics and a Fellow for the White Coat Waste Project