(NaturalHealth365) According to an utterly disturbing recent report from The White Coat Waste Project, the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service has been buying dogs and cats at foreign meat markets, bringing them to the United States, and then feeding their body parts to healthy kittens in the name of ‘research.’

While watchdog reports on animal cruelty are far more common than one would hope, it is indeed rather shocking when the USDA consumer news has confirmed that these gruesome and wholly unnecessary animal experiments involving kitten cannibalism has been occurring at this agency for more than ten years!

Even more disturbing is that this project may still be going on today and has relatively no useful impact concerning public health.

The details being exposed about the USDA’s unnecessary animal experiments

According to the expose from the While Coat Waste Project, the information concerning the ‘truth’ about these cat cannibalism experiments is somewhat challenging to obtain and confirm.

However, what they have revealed – so far – is astonishing. They estimate that these USDA tests began back in 2003 and went on at least through 2015. Some projects involved killing 300 Colombian shelter dogs and feeding their hearts, brains and tongues to lab cats.

Another documented test showed that 50 stray cats from Ethiopia were slaughtered and their hearts were fed to lab mice. What may be even more disheartening is that after the experiments were completed, the perfectly healthy kittens and mice were euthanized rather than being adopted to good homes.

It’s estimated that the USDA researchers killed over 4000 kittens and cats in this manner. What one really must ponder is why these animal experiments were even performed?

What is the purpose of these ALARMING cat cannibalism experiments?

Through feeding kittens the body parts of dogs and cats from overseas, the USDA was originally seeking to better understand the prevalence of toxoplasmosis in animals from around the world. Caused by a common parasite known as Toxoplasma gondii, toxoplasmosis is fairly common globally and is a leading cause of deaths due to food-borne illnesses in the USA.

Cats are known to be a large part of the T. gondii cycle due to them becoming infected by consuming birds, rodents or other animals who are contaminated with these internal parasites. The results end up in the litter box for up to three weeks, increasing human exposure. However, humans also can become infected by consuming undercooked shellfish or meats that are contaminated.

Essentially, there isn’t much more to be learned about T. gondii through such cruel animal experimentation, and it seems that taxpayers don’t want to support such testing anymore. After this USDA consumer news began to leak to the public last year, legislation known as The KITTEN Act has been introduced once again by lawmakers that could put an end to this permanently.

Sources for this article include:

WhiteCoatWaste.org
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NaturalHealth365