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Animal rights organization PETA has filed a complaint with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) after uncovering records showing the federally-funded agency has been bankrolling spine-crushing experiments on rabbits for two decades in Sweden after a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers reintroduced a bill to prohibit such overseas animal testing. Records shared with Breitbart News revealed that NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) has sent millions of dollars to Tatiana Deliagina, an experimenter at the Karolinska Institute in the Stockholm area, supposedly to study human posture. Deliagina has received $3,752,020 in U.S. taxpayer money to conduct the torturous experiments. The NIH funding went on hiatus during the latter half of the first Trump administration before resuming and continuing the last few years into 2025, PETA found. The group obtained records for 127 rabbits used by the researcher between September 2021 and May 2025, estimating that she has used and killed thousands in the last 20 years. The documents also revealed that the experiments have violated NIH’s own animal welfare protocols by forcing animals to suffer past the point at which euthanasia is required and instead using them for more tests before they were killed, PETA said. As part of the experiments, rabbits had their spines crushed, electrodes implanted in their muscles, and in some cases had their brains disconnected from their spinal cords. The complaint filed with the NIH on Wednesday morning called for several actions, including for the agency’s Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW) to withdraw the Karolinska Institute’s Public Health Service (PHS) Animal Welfare Assurance due to “apparent systemic and chronic violations” of the PHS Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals and the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. PETA also called for NINDS to “suspend funding to Dr. Tatiana Deliagina pending a full review of compliance with NIH animal welfare standards,” and for the NIH’s Office of Research Integrity (ORI) to launch an investigation into whether the grant’s progress reports and associated publications “contain any misrepresentations of experimental procedures or outcomes, and take appropriate corrective action if research misconduct is confirmed.” The alarming findings came to light after Reps. Troy Nehls (R-TX) and Dina Titus (D-NV), and Sens. Rick Scott (R-FL) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) reintroduced earlier this year the Cease Animal Research Grants Overseas (CARGO) Act to end NIH funding for any experiments on animals outside the United States. Data from PETA shows that the NIH provided more than $2.2 billion across 45 countries to fund experimentation on various animals between 2011 and 2021. “NIH is moving away from cruel animal experimentation here at home, so turning off the taxpayer money spigot to laboratories abroad makes sense,” Titus said in a statement obtained by Breitbart News. “It is crucial we pass the CARGO Act to end animal suffering worldwide and steward taxpayer dollars toward more reliable non-animal research methods.” PETA senior vice president Kathy Guillermo added in a statement, “It’s sickening that NIH has paid for this atrocity—and we come to expect it in foreign animal laboratories where there is no U.S. oversight.” “PETA calls on NIH to immediately stop funding overseas experiments on animals and urges Congress to pass the CARGO Act without delay,” she said. Back in April, PETA thanked the Trump administration for “helping spare tens of thousands of animals each year” as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) worked to phase out such testing. Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
