According to the report, this experiment includes feeding healthy cats their body parts and injecting them into mice.
This report was published online yesterday (March 20th) by a non-profit organization called "White Coat Garbage Project". It said that these experiments were conducted by the Agricultural Research Bureau of the US Department of Agriculture in the name of research, and their impact on improving public health was very limited.
So, why did USDA spend more than ten years on these strange experiments? [Seven strange facts about mind control of Toxoplasma gondii]
The purpose is to study Toxoplasma gondii, an infection caused by Toxoplasma gondii. Justin Goodman, vice president of the White Coat Waste Project, said WHO helped write the report. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
Toxoplasma gondii is one of the most common parasitic infections in the world. In the United States, it is also the main cause of death caused by food-borne diseases.
Patients can be infected through many ways, such as eating undercooked meat or shellfish contaminated by Toxoplasma gondii cysts, drinking goat's milk that has not been sterilized at high temperature, and touching cat feces. In fact, cats play an important role in the life cycle of parasites: they are infected by eating infected rodents, birds or other small mammals, and then they can excrete millions of oocysts in their feces for up to three weeks.
Goodman told Life Science that by feeding experimental cats with tongues, hearts and brains of dogs and cats from abroad, USDA hopes to understand the prevalence of toxoplasmosis in animals all over the world.
But "these cat cannibalism experiments have nothing to do with human or animal health. Frankly, they sound more like entries in the diary of an emerging serial killer, he said.
The experimental white coat garbage project said that it believed that these "cats eat people" experiments began in 2003 and lasted at least 20 15 years, Goodman said. The report lists several experimental cases: for example, in one case, more than 300 dogs in a shelter in Colombia were killed and their brains, tongues and hearts were fed to experimental cats of the US Department of Agriculture; In another example, nearly 50 Ethiopian stray cats were killed and their hearts were fed to the experimental cat laboratory of the US Department of Agriculture.
Goodman said that these experiments, as well as other experiments on kittens by the Maryland Animal Parasitology Laboratory (APDL) of the Agricultural Research Bureau of the US Department of Agriculture, belong to the category of "Toxoplasma gondii research".
Last year, the same group published a report on another project in the laboratory, in which researchers breed as many as 100 kittens every year. According to this report, once kittens reach the age of 2 months, researchers feed them raw meat contaminated by parasites. Then, the researchers extracted the eggs of parasites from the feces of kittens and used them in food safety experiments.
But after they did, Goodman said, the researchers euthanized kittens that were no longer useful but completely healthy—kittens that might be adopted. The White Garbage Project claims that the USDA is believed to have killed nearly 4,000 kittens in this way. This project was still in progress a few months ago, but legislators recently reintroduced a bill called the Kitten Act, which was first introduced last year. If passed, it may permanently end the practice of killing kittens by the US Department of Agriculture.
According to the report of the White Garbage Project, most of the studies that had a significant impact on Toxoplasma gondii occurred before these strange cat experiments began in the early 20th century. In fact, in the main paper 13 of USDA, they wrote that since 1982, three papers have been published since 2000, and only five papers are about cats or kittens.
"This is not an experiment cited (or) to improve public health, and it certainly does not deserve the support of American taxpayers," Goodman said. They can continue to study Toxoplasma gondii without touching another cat.
More importantly, Goodman said that he thought that "USDA didn't even try to defend what was disclosed yesterday, which proves that they really don't have enough reasons to do so."
ARS was contacted by Field Science for comment, but there was no reply as of press time.
Here, Cat, Cat: 10 Cat lovers release the facts and 6 secrets of your cat personality. America's favorite pet was first published in Life Science.