S4. E5. Justin Goodman: Tax Payer Funded Torture
Justin Goodman is the Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy at White Coat Waste Project, a two and a half million member, taxpayer watchdog group that is working to end twenty billion dollars in taxpayer funded animal experiments.
Justin and I met in D C in February, pre-social distancing. And, it just so happened that on the very morning that we met, White Coat had released footage of National Institute of Health experiments that had been going on for decades. It was a gift for me to be with Justin before and after this interview, and to watch his phone blow up from half of Capitol Hill in reaction to the horrifying footage. I felt like I had front row seats to seeing how effective and powerful White Coat Waste Project is.
And since we met, they’ve had another huge victory: A couple of weeks ago, White Coat exposed how the National Institutes for Health has spent millions of tax dollars funding dangerous coronavirus animal tests at the controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology and just one week after they released their international exposé - Trump promised he’d end the government’s funding of dangerous, cruel and wasteful animal experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology!
And, today is World Day for Laboratory Animals – so, please think about them during this (relatively) short stint in quarantine. They are in it for life, in tiny cages, being tested on and tortured, and almost all of them will never know the sun, the wind, the grass, what it feels like to run, explore, adventure, and discover; nor will they experience life with other animals, to be a part of a herd, a troop, a flock, or a family. Count your blessings and please, stop paying for their abuse.
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Transcript:
Justin: [00:00:00] As an organizational policy. We don't oppose all animal testing. We oppose all taxpayer funded animal testing, which is the overwhelming majority of it. We say if these things are so valuable, let the Gates Foundation or private philanthropists who spend tens of billions of dollars a year on research, let them fund it. But I can tell you right now, Bill Gates is not going to spend $16 million to give monkeys brain damage and scare them with snakes and spiders.
Elizabeth: [00:00:34] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz. This is Species Unite. Today's conversation is with Justin Goodman. Justin is vice president of advocacy and public policy at White Coat Waste Project, a two and one half million member taxpayer watchdog group working to end $20 billion in taxpayer funded animal experiments. Justin and I met in D.C. in February pre-social distancing. It just so happened that on the very morning that we met, White Coat had just released footage of NIH experiments that have been going on for decades. The cool thing for me was to be with Justin before and after this interview and just to see how his phone blew up from half a Capitol Hill, all in reaction to this footage being released. It was like having front row seats to see how effective White Coat Waste Project is. This conversation is especially important right now while we're in the midst of a global pandemic that was caused by how we treat animals, our relationship to animals. If we can't use what's happening in the world right now with COVID 19, this massive tragedy, as an opportunity to rethink these systems and overhaul these industries, then I think it's an enormous loss for the entire planet. Why don't you tell us what White Coat Project is?
Justin: [00:02:04] White Coat Waste is a taxpayer watchdog organization that exists specifically to cut taxpayer funding for animal testing. A lot of people don't realize that it's not cosmetics companies who are the number one culprit when it comes to animal testing, despite what they might see on social media or in the news. The US government is the single largest funder of animal testing in the entire world, which means all of us have a stake in this. All of us have a say in what's going on. If the democratic process works properly, Congress will listen to the majority of Americans who oppose animal testing and start to slash these programs.
Elizabeth: [00:02:40] Will you give us an idea of the numbers?
Justin: [00:02:42] Sure. Of animals used?
Elizabeth: [00:02:44] Yes and money spent.
Justin: [00:02:45] Yeah. So each year, about $20 billion is spent on animal experimentation by the federal government. Just to break down that statistic a little bit. The NIH has a budget of about $40 Billion a year funded by taxpayers, obviously, and they've said about 47% of that is spent on projects that involve animal experiments. Then you think about you start to add in the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and on and on and on. You probably get north of 20 billion. I would say 20 is probably the floor, not the ceiling at this point. In terms of animal numbers, the number that most people kind of operate around is 100 million animals in labs in the United States, most of them in government labs. About 99% of those animals are mice and rats. But we still have tens of thousands of dogs, cats, and over 100,000 primates in laboratories. I think a lot of what I consider to be the worst things that I've ever seen in labs are still happening. I think, you know, there is some misperception that things have changed dramatically since the 1980s.
Elizabeth: [00:04:03] Will you take us through, I mean, I know there's 8 trillion horrible experiments happening right now, but take us through how an experiment that's happening or has been happening for decades. When you get involved, how you find out about it because it's so mysterious and secretive and how you bring it to the public and the whole process.
Justin: [00:04:25] Sure. I can give you an example from this morning.
Elizabeth: [00:04:28] That's a horrific example, but yes.
Justin: [00:04:31] So last June, so June 2019, we were reviewing peer reviewed publications from experimenters at the National Institutes of Health. So inside government labs right here in the D.C. area. We discovered a recent publication that described government employees giving monkeys brain damage by either injecting acid into their brains or sucking out part of their brains that control emotion and then locking those monkeys in tiny cages and intentionally scaring them with things that they instinctively fear, like we instinctively fear, snakes and spiders. So they have a mechanical snake that they put in front of the monkey and you see the monkeys, you know, get startled and huddle in the back of the cage and they can't escape. Then they have what they call a hairy rubber spider that is kind of controlled with puffs of air where they squeeze this little handle and the spider jumps around and you see the monkeys obviously terrified of this. They're in a tiny cage. They can't escape and they're being confronted with this thing they're mortally afraid of. So anyway, we read this paper and the paper happens to mention that they videotaped the experiments. So we submitted an open records request to the National Institutes of Health under the Freedom of Information Act that anyone in the country can do if they want to do that and ask for copies of the documents related to this project, the budgets, the descriptions that were approved, and all the videos. For this experiment and several related ones that added up to about $100 million spent over the last 13 years just on that set of projects. Some of them have been funded since 1977. Some of these exact projects that are still happening involve scaring monkeys or giving them brain damage and making them watch nature documentaries.
Elizabeth: [00:06:22] So what's the justification for doing this?
Justin: [00:06:26] This is all basic curiosity driven research. So if we destroy this part of the brain, what happens if we destroy this part of the brain? What happens? So on and so forth. So you can see there's a lot of job security if you're a government animal experimenter because there's virtually no limit to the number of neurons you can write a grant for and collect money to study and because unfortunately, people at the NIH don't really care so much about animals, they don't bat an eye when these projects come through, they just rubber stamp them. They get going, and then these experimenters hop on their gravy train and 43 years later, they're still being paid to do what's essentially the exact same thing they were doing decades ago and have never improved the life of a single person. So we submitted a records request asking for all those documents. In the meantime, we're looking at all the government databases about this project, how much funding it's gotten, what institute at the NIH is happening in. You kind of start to triangulate the dots between what's on the government database, what's in the peer reviewed publications, and then ultimately what you get back in the records request. So we didn't hear back from them about the requests. In late December, we sued the NIH to compel them to release these documents. In late January they started. We still don't have everything, but they started to provide them. They gave us the approved applications for this particular project, some budget information, and then many, many hours of these trials with different monkeys being experimented on in these fear studies with the snakes and the spiders, you're reading these documents. There's all kinds of disturbing information, like the source of these monkeys they literally write on this document is the NIH non-human primate recycling program.
Elizabeth: [00:08:19] Which is?
Justin: [00:08:20] Which is monkeys never get out of the NIH alive because they're just shuttled from project to project to project to project and they can't take anymore and they kill them.
Elizabeth: [00:08:23] So just you guys getting the information it is a lot of work.
Justin: [00:08:28] Yeah, it takes time. It's expensive. You then have to spend a lot of time reviewing all the content. All of it is about holding the government accountable and creating some transparency about what they're doing with our tax dollars and then letting Americans choose whether that's the way they want their money spent. If it's not, we then give them the tools to contact Congress. So we have a website called Addicted to Spending dot org, which takes people right to a form where they can directly write to their member of Congress and say, This is not something I want to fund anymore. So we do the investigative part. We release it to the media, make sure everyone sees it. We engage our two and a half million advocates and others to make sure they see it. Then I go to Capitol Hill and I meet with those offices that people are writing to and say, okay, well, let's hear from a lot of constituents who are upset about this.
Elizabeth: [00:09:18] Are they shocked when you go?
Justin: [00:09:20] I mean, I could show you my phone right now. I'm literally getting emails from staffers saying, what the hell is going on, you know, from people who work on Capitol Hill who fund these agencies? Where is this happening? What the hell is going on? How has this gone on for so long? What can we do to help? Then that's how you build the coalition and we like to build coalitions of members who are strange bedfellows from different sides of the political spectrum because these are nonpartisan issues. So whether you care about animal welfare or government waste or both, there's a reason for you to engage in this. So we work with people like Rand Paul and James Lankford and Joni Ernst, who are kind of what we call Waste Warriors. But these are people on the Hill releasing reports about stupid government programs. This is right in their wheelhouse because they're always looking for programs that have gone on too long and wasted too much money and not provided benefits for people. The animal ones get people's attention actually more than others, because everyone loves animals. So it's a little more intriguing and we work with the people who are the best on animal welfare issues, like the co-chairs of the Animal Protection Caucus, Vern Buchanan from Florida. So there's really something for everyone here as long as it's presented kind of in this neutral way that we don't care if you care about the animal issue or the government waste issue as long as you want to help.
Elizabeth: [00:10:33] Right.
Justin: [00:10:33] White Coat Waste is the home for you. Whether you're an advocate or a member of Congress or a member of the media, we don't ask people if they eat meat or wear leather or if they've been to the circus or those aren't our issues because we need everyone to agree on this one thing to make progress. We're not an animal rights organization. We're a taxpayer watchdog group where we happen to focus on this issue. So we also take positions that other groups wouldn't take. So, for example, if you read our website as an organizational policy, we don't oppose all animal testing. We oppose all taxpayer funded animal testing, which is the overwhelming majority of it. We say if these things are so valuable, let the Gates Foundation or private philanthropists who spend tens of billions of dollars a year on research. Let them fund it. But I can tell you right now, Bill Gates is not going to spend $16 million to give monkeys brain damage and scare them with snakes and spiders.
Elizabeth: [00:11:20] When I mentioned animal testing to people who aren't really aware or anybody, actually there's usually one of two or three answers. One is, I had no idea we were still testing. I hear that a lot. Or I hear, well, I mean, if my kid had this disease like they're kind of pro it, but they don't actually understand what it is or what's being tested on and for and the success and really the failure of it. Or they say, oh, that's okay, I don't use this laundry detergent or that beauty product. So I think there's a huge amount, I mean, but the misconceptions of it to begin with are really out there.
Justin: [00:12:05] Yeah. I mean, there's definitely a disconnect. You know, we talk about it as a tale of two trends. If you look at public opinion over the last decade, we now have for the first time, according to Pew Research, a growing majority of the public opposes animal testing when they're asked. At the same time, more money is being spent by the government on it than ever, and more animals are in labs than ever. So there's this disconnect between what people expect and what people want and what the government is actually doing. That's because there's been historically at least a failure to translate effectively that public opposition into policy changes and legislative action, which is kind of why we came on the scene, because we thought here we have over half the public on the right side of this issue, yet we haven't really seen those reforms that should be happening as a result of that, especially since this is this is a taxpayer issue. So it's not just consumers making their voices known. This is everyone who pays their taxes. We want to see these programs change.
Elizabeth: [00:13:05] Well, and you've had some pretty incredible victories, too.
Justin: [00:13:08] It's been really interesting. I spent a decade working at PETA before coming to White Coat and it's interesting. I mean, these aren't new issues, right? Animal experimentation was kind of the first animal issue that there was an organized movement to stop starting in the 1880s in the United States and even earlier in the UK. We've just taken an old issue and reframed it in a new way to make people understand that maybe they didn't realize it, but this is something they should care about.
Elizabeth: [00:13:36] Well, and they're paying for it.
Justin: [00:13:37] And they're paying for it. That's what makes it relevant to everyone. We make it very easy for people to engage with the content, engage with their members of Congress. As a result, we do get a lot of wins. So this not this past week and the weekend before I was in Florida visiting 26 squirrel monkeys who we got out of an FDA lab that we shut down in 2018. The FDA had spent five and a half million dollars to addict these young squirrel monkeys to nicotine. They put them in these little boxes and strapped on a vest with a catheter in it, and they'd press a lever and it would infuse nicotine into their veins directly over and over and over again. They were trying to see at what level nicotine becomes addictive so that they can tell cigarette companies to develop cigarettes that have lower than that dose in it. So people don't get addicted. But obviously people will smoke more than right to get the level of nicotine that's going to make them addictive and feel good and all of that. So it was nonsense. The head of the FDA, one of the first trips he took after taking that position at the FDA, he's no longer there, but when he was going to that lab in Arkansas and he got back and said, we're going to shut this down. So he suspended the project, then ended it, and then ultimately decided to send the monkeys to jungle friends down in Florida. So that's a situation where we discover the program. We exposed it through the Freedom of Information Act. We worked with media. We worked with Dr. Jane Goodall, who called it taxpayer funded torture in a letter to the FDA. This program that no one knew about a couple of months before, all of a sudden was a headline in The Washington Post that it was being shut down.
Elizabeth: [00:15:19] What was it like when you saw these monkeys with freedom?
Justin: [00:15:23] So the first time I met them, I cried because I'd seen them only on the videos in these tiny cages or in the experimentation chambers. These are fellow primates, so I can relate to them to some degree. We can expect that their experience is like ours. So I just think about, Well, what if that was me? That's how I'd seen them. So then to be in Florida and see them outside together in groups playing and swinging and foraging and doing all these natural behaviors that they were never allowed to engage in before. It speaks certainly to their resilience, but also gives you hope that if we could do it for these 26 monkeys, then we, the other 100,000 primates and labs have a chance as well to not only for us to shut down the projects, but to give them a second chance. One of our other efforts is making sure that there's infrastructure in place at these agencies, that when either a project runs its course or one of our campaigns shuts it down, that they have to consider sending those animals to a sanctuary in the case of primates, or we've gotten some cats and dogs adopted out to private homes to give those animals the second chance.
Elizabeth: [00:16:31] Tell us about the new law putting animals up for adoption?
Justin: [00:16:35] Yeah, so we're working on legislation called the AFTER Act, which is the animal's freedom from testing, experimentation and research Act. There's a version in the House and the Senate, and this bill says every federal agency that experiments on animals must have a policy in place allowing them to be adopted out or retired at the end of research. So we have this legislation, but at the same time, we're also pushing each individual agency to create those policies on their own, because really it shouldn't take a law to make them do it. Luckily, we've had some success. So we've gotten so far from the Department of Veterans Affairs. We had a big campaign against dog testing. They now have a policy and we know some dogs have gotten out as a result. We got the National Institutes of Health to adopt a policy, although it has a loophole and doesn't include primates. So that's something we're now dealing with fixing. But then the most recent one is the Food and Drug Administration. So on the heels of that happy ending for those 26 squirrel monkeys from the nicotine lab, White Coat, and Congress went back to the FDA and said, hey, you did this, you did the right thing, why don't you make this a standard operating procedure where you at least consider sending other primates to sanctuaries or other species to whatever suitable homes might be available to them after experiments. To their credit, they adopted an agency wide policy allowing that, now it doesn't mean they're necessarily going to take advantage of it. So there's still work for us and our advocates to do to keep the pressure on to make sure that they use that policy whenever possible.
Elizabeth: [00:18:05] So what about the people who do say, I just want to talk about the numbers and how ineffective these experiments are? The people who do say, well, listen, if my child had such and such, how can I not support this? Kind of thinking that it's really solving medical questions and problems?
Justin: [00:18:25] Yeah, I mean, I get that sense of desperation that people might feel right. My grandmother died of Alzheimer's. I watched her die very slowly for a long time. I was miserable for my whole family, her most of all, but all of us who had to watch that 99.6% of Alzheimer's drugs that pass animal tests, including primates, fail in humans because they don't work or they're dangerous. That's not the exception. That's the rule. Whatever disease area you look at, whatever drug area you look at, the general statistic is 95% of drugs that pass animal tests fail in human trials because they're toxic or ineffective.
Elizabeth: [00:19:02] And that's been the case forever. Correct?
Justin: [00:19:05] Yes.
Elizabeth: [00:19:05] But we've still just kept doing it.
Justin: [00:19:08] Yes, we have. Because it's a big business. It's big business. If you think about it, we think about $20 billion. How's that money being spent? It's going to pay experimenter salaries. It's going to pay support staff salaries. It's going to the companies that make the cages, that make the bedding, that make the food, that breed the animals, that transport the animals, that have professional organizations that represent all of those staffers. Then for the money that goes to universities and colleges, they're taking 30 to 40% of that money right off the top just to cover what is called indirect costs. So administrative fee costs like renovating buildings or keeping the lights on or.
Elizabeth: [00:19:53] So that's why there's so much testing at universities?
Justin: [00:19:55] Yes, there's a huge incentive for universities to keep the gravy train chugging along, as it were, because there's just so much money involved. Even if they don't like or care about the animal experiments, they're getting so much money for every grant that gets approved and comes in that there are morals don't dictate to them that maybe they should say no to that money so that by the time the money gets there, it's too late, right? They've cash the check, they've started the experiment, they purchased all the equipment, which is why we try to work on the front side of things and say that money shouldn't go there in the first place or it should be much harder to get it. But historically that hasn't been so, you know, a lot of the work we do, again, is getting answers to basic questions that we should be able to answer, like how much money is being spent, where, how many animals are being used, those types of things.
Elizabeth: [00:20:40] I imagine you come up with so much resistance. People don't want to share this, do they?
Justin: [00:20:44] No they don't. Which is why we have so many lawsuits pending against different federal agencies who don't want to give you basic information like costs or who's involved in the experiments and what they're doing.
Elizabeth: [00:20:57] And they've kept it secret for so long.
Justin: [00:20:59] Exactly.
Elizabeth: [00:21:00] Speaking of universities, when you were in grad school, this is kind of how you started, right?
Justin: [00:21:04] Yeah. So I've been vegan since the nineties, but wasn't really an activist. I never even really talked about it with people, my wife too for just about just as long separately from me, I grew up in New York. She grew up in Pennsylvania. We met in New York. But she was also into animal rights but never was never an activist, per se. We moved to San Diego and I was in a speech communications class at San Diego City College at the time, and we had to give a presentation on how to make something and because I'd been thinking a little more about animal issues, I thought, I'll give a presentation on how to make a hamburger. But from the very beginning, I went up there with a really graphic photo and gave a presentation about how you make a hamburger, where the cows, the factory farming, all of that, slaughterhouses. I came into class the next day, and this guy who sat next to me and I never said a word to me before leaned over and he said, hey, I decided to go vegetarian after your presentation. Fast forward almost 20 years. This guy is now my best friend in the world.
Elizabeth: [00:22:13] That's such a good story.
Justin: [00:22:14] So it kind of planted a seed for me because I'd never considered doing activism or public speaking, nothing like that. But that experience kind of planted the seed for me that, okay, let's see where my life brings me. But maybe this is something that was very rewarding and felt good and maybe I could do more of that. So we finished what we were doing in San Diego and got into grad school at the University of Connecticut, flew back east, and I was searching around on the Internet one day and discovered they're on the USDA report. So every lab has to file an annual report with the USDA saying how many animals it has, excluding mice and rats. They're not counted under the law right now. So I noticed that there are, I forget how many, but a handful of monkeys at UConn.
Elizabeth: [00:22:59] You were just searching around.
Justin: [00:23:00] Yeah, you know, I was just digging around. I don't remember exactly what kind of set me on that particular task. But so I was just digging around one day. I found this report on these monkeys. So I started looking into what it might be. So I was Googling things like UConn monkeys and found some of these published papers about what they were doing. They were invasive brain experiments. So I discovered this monkey lab and I submitted a records request for more details. I got back all these records documenting animals who had been injured and killed or died in the course of the experiment, one monkey was uncooperative and the notes noted he was uncooperative and they dragged him so hard by his neck one day that his eyes bled. Just horrible, horrible stuff that no one ever really reported properly the government had incited them for. So I just started publicizing this stuff with the paper up there is the Hartford Courant. There was a great reporter there named Grace Merritt at the time who kind of covered the case. The student paper was covering it. We were protesting on campus all the time. Fast forward two years, they ended the experiment early and they had to give money back to the government because basically the government says if you're abusing animals, you can't spend taxpayers money during that period and they don't usually enforce that but we got lucky and they had to give back a bunch of money. I was in a PhD program at the time, spending most of my time on this campaign, honestly, and I thought, my heart is not in academia. I need to be somewhere where it's more fast paced and we can make change immediately and make noise. So I left the program, I got my master's, I left the program, and I went to work for PETA on their animal testing campaigns and was there for about a decade.
Elizabeth: [00:24:46] Now you have a whole animal rights family.
Justin: [00:24:50] Yeah, my brother is an attorney at PETA, Jared. He's great. He's worked on SeaWorld and a lot of those big campaigns.
Elizabeth: [00:24:56] Were you guys vegans like growing up?
Justin: [00:24:59] My brother and I found animal rights and veganism through punk rock music. In the mid late nineties. We'd go see bands play and there would be tables set up by little local animal rights groups with literature and videos playing on a little VCR, like a TV VCR combo. I think for both of us, it just kind of spoke to something inside us that was already always there. We always had an affinity for animals, and it made sense. I thought, Oh, I didn't realize you could not eat animals. Of course I'm not going to do that anymore.
Elizabeth: [00:25:28] Right. And your wife, too?
Justin: [00:25:29] Yeah. My wife's a professor at Marymount University in Arlington, and her research focuses on burnout and animal rights activists, as well as PTSD in chimps and dogs rescued from labs. So she spends or used to spend more but time at chimpanzee sanctuaries observing behavior of chimps rescued from labs is the first one to do observational research, actually watching chimps and cataloging and comparing their behavior with chimps from labs. She's done a big study with dogs, comparing dogs who've rescued from labs with non lab dogs and showing that they can be great pets and just kind of helping provide the scientific basis for all of these adoption and retirement efforts because people think, oh, well, they were in a lab, they're probably so damaged they can never, you know, be a regular dog or live a normal life. That's totally not true. Whether it's primates or dogs, they're very resilient. Kari Bagnall, who runs the Jungle Friend Sanctuary in Florida, where the monkeys are, says that they need freedom and sunshine. The monkeys, which is, you know.
Elizabeth: [00:26:28] And also just to be able to witness these animals that have been so tortured to have freedom and sunshine. It's like hope.
Justin: [00:26:37] Yeah and you don't get those happy endings. You know, the truth is, you know, at UConn, those monkeys, they shut down that lab. They sent them to another lab that was doing almost the exact same thing and they killed them. Even though we had sanctuaries and money and everything ready to go, just out of spite. They killed them. So it's very rare to have a situation where you end an experiment and the animals make it out alive.
Elizabeth: [00:27:00] And what about dogs? You've done a lot with the VA and shutting down certain dog testing. Are they still doing any?
Justin: [00:27:08] So there's about 60,000 dogs in the United States in laboratories, several hundred of those inside government labs. Our focus is generally on the agencies themselves and what they're doing here, mostly in the D.C. area, because that's where Congress has direct authority. So the VA and the NIH use more dogs than any other agencies and experiments. The VA at the time when we launched our campaign in 2016, was the only federal agency using dogs in what we call maximum pain experiments. So these are experiments that are painful and where no pain relief is provided intentionally. So VA became public enemy number one as far as we were concerned in terms of needing reform. So we launched a campaign against VA's dog testing and these experiments involved, just to give you the range of them, breeding Dobermans to have the sleep disorder, narcolepsy, where they spontaneously fall asleep and then injecting them with methamphetamines. That was happening at the Los Angeles VA for a very long time. The Milwaukee VA was doing just basic invasive brain research on dogs, drilling in their skulls and implanting electrodes and seeing what happens. The Cleveland VA was crippling dogs by severing your spinal cords. Then Richmond, which was the worst. Imagine that. I'm saying that's the worst after that, it's got to be bad. Richmond was and still is to some degree injecting latex in puppies arteries to induce heart attacks and then forcing them to run on treadmills to stress their damaged hearts. Then, of course, they kill all of them. So our campaign is to shut down Los Angeles, it's shut down Cleveland. It's shut down Milwaukee. It shut down some of the experiments in Richmond. Then we just got first ever legislation signed into law in December telling the VA it has to completely phase out primate dog and cat testing by 2025, the first time Congress has ever set a deadline for something like that.
Elizabeth: [00:29:09] Well, I mean, the VA could be spending this money really in a much more effective way.
Justin: [00:29:14] Yeah I mean the VA has been criticized a lot for not providing not meeting its mission or providing care and services to veterans in an efficient way. That's one of the reasons the campaign was so successful, because there were so many veterans and veterans advocates involved saying, I can't even get a doctor's appointment. You have an entire floor of this building in Richmond dedicated to torturing dogs for things that aren't helping anyone. Meanwhile, the head of the union at the Richmond VA did an op ed about the campaign talking about all these nurses who were having to meet patients in hallways because there's no space for them, yes all the space is dedicated to experimenting on animals. The success of it was due in part to the wide range of advocates it brought together to work on the issue of veterans in Congress, veterans organizations, veterans advocates, as well as people concerned with animals and government waste and of course, everyone loves dogs.
Elizabeth: [00:30:09] Yeah. So tell us about the EPA's pledge to end all of their animal testing by 2035.
Justin: [00:30:16] One of the campaigns that we had going until recently was called EPA Sucks. We had a billboard that said EPA sucks right out of their lab in North Carolina. That was a play on the fact that they do these inhalation experiments on animals where they force them to breathe diesel exhaust and other things. So we had this EPA Sucks campaign and we got legislation passed into law directing the EPA to make greater efforts to reduce its use of animals. A lot of this ends up coming down to individual personalities. So at the EPA, we were lucky to get Andrew Wheeler in there, who's been criticized by a lot of people because he came from the coal industry. But he is a dyed in the wool animal person who when I went for him to make the announcement about the 2035 phase out for all EPA animal testing, he handed us an op ed he wrote in the eighties for his student paper in Cleveland when he was in college opposing animal testing. He had a pin on from the mid eighties March for Animals here in Washington DC and his whole family's animal lovers. So, you know, the science was there, the public sentiment was there, but the political will had not been there before. Then you get the right person and the right job and he made it a priority and said, okay, we're going to draw a line in the sand by 2035. No more testing on mammals. So that was amazing. That was the first time ever in history that an agency had set a deadline for ending again it's not all animal testing, it's mammal testing, which is most of what they do at this point.
Elizabeth: [00:31:47] And it's still 15 years.
Justin: [00:31:48] And it's still 15 years. But I think people have to realize, look back 150 years, not a whole hell of a lot has happened in the last hundred and 50 years in terms of systemic structural changes. So 15 years seems like a long time, but I think a lot of change will happen before that. In the big scheme of things, it's not that long. Most agencies plan to experiment on animals indefinitely, if they can have their way.
Elizabeth: [00:32:13] Talk to me about how people can get behind you guys.
Justin: [00:32:17] So part of my job is lobbying on Capitol Hill. It does make a difference when I go into these offices and they've heard from their constituents. Now we have two and a half million members and it’s people who are very committed to this particular issue. So it's not just people who are politically, you know, liberal or progressive or whatever. When I think that's how most people look at animals, you know, the animal movement is being very left leaning. But the truth is, it's not. I mean, my dad's a vegan Trumper. So he's kind of our target audience. But we really want to create a place where there's people who have felt homeless in the movement before or not even part of it.
Elizabeth: [00:32:57] Like, tell me about some of them in terms of feeling homeless.
Justin: [00:33:00] There's a lot of members of Congress who work with us who have zeroes on every scorecard that other animal groups put out. Because on the traditional issues that people are pushing on Capitol Hill, whatever animal issues they are, there's almost a reflexive resistance by a lot of people, especially in the center and the right, against anything that has that touches animal welfare, because the groups that represented are typically liberal and asking things to be banned and taxed, and they want more government, not less. That's what they see as the solution to everything. But then there's all these members on the right who really are very passionate about our issue and love that we're going after it from a government spending perspective and say, actually, the solution to this problem is not spending more money, it's spending less money. You know, we have a trillion dollar budget deficit right now. So there's members who are very interested in finding ways to cut programs or they have things they want to see funded but need to find money to pay for that. So like one of our best members is Congressman Matt Gaetz, who is Donald Trump's favorite House member I think. His district is one of the reddest in the entire country, but he is probably our top Republican leader on these issues. He's given floor speeches, so he's gone on the floor of Congress and talked about the EPA animal testing. He got down there and he was like, EPA has a lot of problems, but it's now hit a new low and then starts describing these inhalation experiments they're doing on rabbits. That's why I think why you see these big sweeping changes that we haven't seen before, because we really have made this something bipartisan that you can move through the House that's run by Democrats, you can move through the Senate that's run by Republicans and we have support in the administration. So I'm very lucky. It's an exciting and fun and new way to attack an issue that I've been working on for 15 years. I feel like we've gotten a lot done in a very short period of time, so people stay excited and they're willing to do what you ask them to do because they know we're going to get the change we want to see.
Elizabeth: [00:34:56] So for 2020, what are the biggest campaigns you have going on?
Justin: [00:34:59] The primates are going to continue to be a big deal for us. We had language in a few different spending bills last year that were signed into law pushing the FDA and the NIH on to reducing primate testing. So this big investigation we released today is kind of the first missive in the second wave of that campaign, which is demonstrating to all of the members of Congress why it was important to create more transparency and accountability for the NIH. We're talking about monkeys being brain damaged and being scared with snakes and spiders. That's the reality of what you're paying for.
Elizabeth: [00:35:32] It's like a like a stupid horror movie.
Justin: [00:35:34] Yeah. So we're working on primate testing. We're continuing to work on the dog issue. The VA still has some operating dog labs, and the new legislation we got enacted addresses cats and primates at the VA, too. We've been looking at foreign research. The government sends a lot of US money to foreign countries for animal testing. They've been sending money to the UK to addict zebrafish to nicotine.
Elizabeth: [00:36:00] Like it's all so stupid.
Justin: [00:36:03] Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that's cruel. There's a lot of stuff that's silly. There's a lot of stuff that's stupid. There's no shortage of content, so I have job security. I wish I did. I wish I could retire and there wasn't. But that's the current state of things. But there is this heightened awareness and again the science has existed for a long time. We know it doesn't work. The public opinion is where it needs to be. It's just about finding the political will on Capitol Hill to get things done. So that's why that's our challenge to the government experimenters. It's like right now you're forcing people who don't want to pay for this stuff, to pay for it, go out and actually compete and talk to people who actually need to get in return on their investment. Then we'll see who gives you money. I can bet a lot of these guys are going to have to find a new job because no one's going to be willing to write a check for that.
Elizabeth: [00:36:52] Are they just sitting there like sitting ducks waiting to get called out or.
Justin: [00:36:56] I think they are to some degree, they always lament that they're getting attacked and they're not good at responding. You know, I see all that all the time and it makes me laugh. They have a serious PR problem. They can only say so much until people realize what they're actually doing. Right. You can say we experiment on dogs. Let's say, okay, well, what do you actually do then? You have to get into it and that's what they don't want to tell people, right? So they're in a bit of a pickle because they probably want to say more sometimes, but they can't really because it's only going to make the situation worse. Most of the testing that happens, I would estimate maybe 70 to 75% is completely voluntary. So these are people out of thin air thinking of some idea and choosing to write a grant proposal for that idea and take the money and do the experiment. There's no government agency saying you have to do this. That's our job, is to say it's 2020. Figure out another way to do your job that doesn't involve wasting our money on torturing animals and these are some of the smartest people in the world, way overeducated. They have lots of options. They could do anything and they're choosing to torture animals with other people's money for a living. So our job is to make them not do that and make a different decision.
Elizabeth: [00:38:10] They could actually be really helping the world.
Justin: [00:38:12] Absolutely. But, you know, it's a cultural problem, too. It's from the time you're depending on what you're studying, from the time you're a high schooler or an undergraduate, you're being taught that this is the way to solve the problem. Just one more monkey, just one more grant, just one more year, and you're going to get that breakthrough and people are brainwashed and then they invest their whole career in it. By the time they're doing that for 20 years, they don't care if I come around and say, Hey, you really shouldn't be doing that. It's like, Well, no, I built my whole career. I published papers. This is what I'm known for. This is my reputation for doing this. It's the only thing I know and now you're telling me I've got to go learn how to work with humans who could say no? I have to schedule them and I can't just lock them in a cage all day, so.
Elizabeth: [00:38:57] And something might actually work.
Justin: [00:38:59] Yeah, imagine that. But you don't want things to work because if things work, then you don't have the money to keep coming.
Elizabeth: [00:39:06] Right. Good point.
Justin: [00:39:07] So you want to just keep tinkering forever because then you have job security because it's not about good science. So find another job and if they don't do it voluntarily or they're going to get forced into retirement. That's ultimately our goal is to force the animal experimenters into retirement.
Elizabeth: [00:39:26] I love your goal. It's incredible what you're doing.
Justin: [00:39:29] Yeah. Thank you. I mean, we are very lucky. There's a lot of people who are very passionate advocates on this issue, and particularly within White Coat who take action when we ask them to, they donate. They do everything to make us successful. We pick a campaign. We work it until we can't get any more out of it, then we move on to the next thing. To be honest, we have a bandwidth problem right now. There's more issues to work on obviously, there's more members of Congress than ever who are writing and saying, I want a piece of the next one, I want to be the lead on this issue. So we have a problem of plenty, which is great.
Elizabeth: [00:40:07] That's awesome.
Justin: [00:40:09] Yeah. Again, it's bad because there's plenty of animals and labs. But they're going to be there no matter what. So if the animals are there, but we have more people than ever trying to help them, that's a good thing. That's where we are right now in 2020. So I'm hopeful. I'm bullish. I'm bullish.
Elizabeth: [00:40:26] I love it. Thank you so much, Justin.
Justin: [00:40:28] Thank you.
Elizabeth: [00:40:39] If you would like to learn more and get behind White Coat Waste Project, which is something that every single one of us should do, really, there's no reason not to, go to their website. It's Whitecoatwaste.org. Our website is Species Unite and while you're there, subscribe to our newsletter and get all the latest happening to animals across the planet. We are also on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you'd like to support the podcast, which is something that we would greatly appreciate, you can do so in one of two ways: subscribe, rate and review wherever you listen to podcasts. We're also on Patreon, it's Patreon/SpeciesUnite. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Nathalie Martin, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thanks again and have a wonderful day.
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