National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Indian American director Jay Bhattacharya has earned praise for closing the agency’s last in-house beagle laboratory on the NIH campus.
Bhattacharya told Fox News People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) reached out to him following the closure of the beagle testing facility, sending him flowers. “Normally, I think NIH directors tend to get physical threats, but they sent me flowers,” Bhattacharya said.
PETA in 2021 highlighted former White House Advisor Anthony Fauci’s alleged approval of funding for tests in Tunisia where beagle puppies were drugged, and their heads were locked in cages filled with hungry, infected sandflies.
After the reports came out, 23 bipartisan lawmakers, including Rep. Nancy Mace, (R-SC), sent a letter to Fauci addressing the heartbreaking experiments.
Yesterday, I sent a letter to Dr. Fauci regarding cruel, taxpayer-funded experiments on puppies; debarking before drugging and killing them,” Mace wrote in an October 2021 post on X. “This is disgusting. What say you @NIH.”
READ: ‘American health is going backwards’: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (March 6, 2025)
Kathy Guillermo, PETA senior vice president of laboratory investigations, told Fox News Digital on Sunday night the organization is “delighted” by the news of the NIH facility closure.
“We are letting the new NIH Director know how important this step is for modernizing science, and we’re especially happy because these last experiments involved sepsis, which we have been working to end for several years. Sepsis experiments on animals are failures.”
Guillermo noted PETA has a lawsuit pending, filed under the Biden administration, to try to prevent the government from funding any more sepsis experiments.
The Indiana-based company that bred the beagles for research, Envigo, pleaded guilty in 2024 to neglecting thousands of dogs at its Cumberland, Virginia, breeding facility, and will be required to pay more than $35 million in fines, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association.
“We are just thrilled to see that the [Envigo] beagles who were used [at the NIH location], will no longer be used,” Guillermo said. “We first exposed [Envigo] in an undercover investigation that eventually led to the closure of the facility and the release of 4,000 beagles to good homes.”
PETA is awaiting information about the condition of the dogs that will be released, and if they are in good enough shape to be placed in a home, Guillermo said they stand ready to help.
“Dr. Bhattacharya has made a wonderful start, and there is a lot more work to be done, because animals are being experimented on, including beagles and other dogs, across the country,” she said. “So we’re looking forward to what comes next.”
READ: Jay Bhattacharya vows to address America’s chronic disease crisis (April 2, 2025)
The now-shuttered facility had drawn criticism over the years for controversial sepsis research involving dogs—procedures that included infecting more than 2,000 beagles with pneumonia-causing bacteria, draining their blood, and inducing septic shock.
The announcement comes just days after Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk posted on X that he would investigate funding beagle experiments.
A report from the White Coat Waste (WCW) project detailed the lab’s history of allegedly pumping pneumonia-causing bacteria into more than 2,000 beagles’ lungs, bleeding them out, and forcing them into septic shock for deadly experiments.