UnchainedTV: Meet The Cat Who Escaped a U.S. Government Torture Lab

0:06 Welcome to Unchained TV, featuring best-selling author, TV journalist, and the founder of the Unchained TV free streaming network, Jane Valez Mitchell. You're about to hear a secret solution to the problems that plague our world. If you want to revolutionise your health, get truly joyful, and jump to the next phase of human evolution, all it takes is one simple choice. Now, here's your host, Jane Valez Mitchell. And we have some breaking news for you. You are going to meet a man who was doing quite possibly more than anybody else on the planet to end ridiculous, cruel, wasteful, taxpayer-funded animal torture, Anthony Bellotti.

0:51 And the breaking news is that this man has stopped some of these hideous experiments. If you're listening, take our word for it. It's horrible. They slashed her face with scissors, contorted her face, electro-shocked her body. It's just unbelievable what government money is doing in terms of animal torture. It's your tax bill. And what is it accomplishing? A whole heck of nothing, okay? And this organisation, White Coat Waste, has shut down a lot of these ridiculous experiments that are really money-making machines.

1:34 So they're urging you to go to whitecoatwaste .org and get involved. And now you're going to meet the man who has done so much to shut down these labs, the one and only Anthony Bellotti. And not only Anthony, you're going to meet Delilah, one of the cats that he pulled out of one of these torture, these mediaeval torture chambers. Tell us, Anthony, what did you do with Delilah and why is this happening? Hi, Jane, and thanks for having both of us on. This is Delilah here, and she's very grateful, as am I, for the opportunity to be on the show today and talk about the federal animal testing crisis, federal animal testing.

2:23 And that's what we work on here. White Coat Waste is a bipartisan government watchdog and nonprofit organisation, and we are fighting to expose and close the U.S. government's animal testing business. So Delilah here is a survivor of animal testing. And not just from any cat lab, but she came from the largest federal cat lab in the United States government, the largest taxpayer -funded lab that there was, abusing cats and kittens. And White Coat Waste Project exposed and closed her lab approximately five years ago.

3:04 We just celebrated the five-year anniversary of this lab. It's had enormous ripple effects for cats and kittens and many, many other animals across the government. As you can see here, Delilah is also number 87. You can see the tattoos in both of her ears. And I have a tight shot of that. Here it is. You can see the circle. That is the tattoo. And it says here, 5,436 perished in USDA's Kitten Slaughterhouse. That's right. The greatest day of my life was the day when leading the campaign that exposed and closed that lab.

3:46 For nearly 50 years, almost 50 years, continually taxpayer-funded, this lab was abusing cats and kittens. And not just here, but abroad. They were doing toxoplasmosis research. They were feeding kittens rotten meat infected with the toxoplasmosis parasites, infecting them. And they were only two or three months old. And then they slaughtered and incinerated them. They killed them all. And this was going on for, again, almost five decades. Delilah here, we liberated from that lab.

4:29 She was a breeder. She was used as an incubator for the kittens in that lab. 22 of her kittens were killed. They were slaughtered and they were burned. And thousands and thousands of others suffered the same fate. We put out a massive investigation a few years ago. And we rallied Republicans and Democrats together on the Hill to help us to cut the purse strings and cut the funding to that lab. And after five decades, we knocked it out, shut it down. And we were able to free the survivors. I actually adopted two of them.

5:11 And sadly, little petite, who was the other cat I adopted, she passed away just very recently. And this is, yeah. This is, it's so horrifying to me because I pay taxes, as I'm sure you do. And we have no control over where our money goes to these ridiculous experiments. And we're going to get into just how ridiculous they are. But this has touched a nerve already. The phone lines are lining up. Tiffany in Los Angeles, what is your question or thought for Anthony Bilotti, the head of White Coat Waste? Good afternoon, Jane, and thank you for taking my call.

5:51 And Anthony, thank you for, I had no idea that our tax dollars are going to experiments on cats. So much of this is hidden from us. I was wondering what your background is. Did you work in a lab or how were you, how did you come about to find out about this cause? Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Tiffany. Thank you for the question. I did indeed work in an animal lab when I was 17 years old. I'm going to date myself. It was 1995. It was 29 summers ago, right around this time. And I thought I wanted to be a doctor. I thought I would get a letter of recommendation for college and go into medical.

6:34 My dad was a dentist, is a dentist, and I wanted to follow in that kind of footsteps. I liked science. And I did an internship in an animal lab in the New York area. And I remember saying to myself, you know, after a day of working in the lab with, with pigs, which was the, the, uh, the animal that they were using and abusing in that lab. And I said to myself, if this is one of the good labs, what the heck are they doing in the bad ones? You know, I was, I was really just horrified by what I saw and I wasn't involved with, with, with, with fighting animal testing. I wasn't involved with animal rights.

7:15 I wasn't involved with anything. I was 17 years old. I was just involved with applying to college. I was a kid and it was a wake up call. And I said, I want to do something about this. This is, this is going to be my life's work. And I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know what to do. Um, I didn't know how to fight it. I know how to fight it now, but it took me, it took me a hot minute to figure out the secret sauce to saving cats and springing them from labs and shutting them down. I didn't know about taxes. I didn't pay taxes. Uh, I was a kid, right? I, I, what did I know? So, you know, I bounced around a bit. Um, and my first job out of school was working in investment banking.

8:02 I thought I was going to my, my big, my, my, my, my great plan was to make a lot of money and fund, fund the camp. I thought I'd be a funder, you know, fund the campaigns to fight back against what you're seeing on the screen. My, my, my half-baked plan came undone sometime after nine 11, I was laid off. I wasn't very good at banking. I wasn't making a lot of money that plan needed to be rethought. So then I said, all right, what can I do to be good? What's what, what would I be good at? What skill can I learn to, to help animals? What would be a good cause we're banking and raising, you know, save out that didn't work. So what can I do?

8:43 And I went to DC to learn how to run campaigns. My background was in political campaigning and public affairs. I became a professional, uh, campaign consultant, a political consultant, and I wanted to learn a trait that I thought would be valuable for animals. How do we run professional strategic campaigns? How did we learn about public opinion polls and advertising and targeting and research and investigations? And I pursued a professional path in, in that world, working for, for candidates and advocacy organisations. Uh, Arnold Schwarzenegger was one of what I worked on his campaign as a, as an opposition researcher.

9:25 I learned about fundraising. I learned about targeting. I learned about research and I learned a skillset and I learned a skillset that, that I thought would be super helpful for, for running professional campaigns. And, and I learned eventually that animal testing is taxpayer funded. And if you can fund something, you can defund it. Think about that. The U S government spends wastes, it wastes it $20 billion a year on animal testing. That's more than the entire private sector combined. Think about that. Delilah's lab was taxpayer funded, 22 and a half million dollars in us tax money.

10:09 The government is the funder. It is the market maker. And I realised I had the, I had the realisation that again, based on some of the I was working on on the, uh, at the time that if you can cut the purse strings, you can cut the problem. If you can cut the funding, you can cut the problem. So I came up with the idea for the white coat waste project. That's what, and we've changed the world. You have indeed. And I know you would like everybody to get involved. You can't do it alone. Go to whitecoatwaste.org and get involved. Um, you are, I think a brilliant organiser. We're going to talk about the global headlines that you achieved, uh, during the pandemic.

10:56 And that is an entire saga, but first we've got another caller Nilo far in Dallas, Texas, your question or thought for Anthony Bilotti, who is with Delilah, one of the cats that he got out of these torture labs. What do you have to ask him? Hi, it's such an honour. Um, I'm going to bring up the Beagle Gate campaign because it went viral and, um, it's such a huge victory for animal rights, especially since Fauci and his cronies at the NIH tried to cover it up. Um, and, um, especially this lab was in Tunisia. And I know that the Biden administration also knew that Fauci was lying and covering it up.

11:42 Um, so in the midst of the orchestrated coverup, the proof is in the pudding. And my question is why isn't Fauci in jail? All right. Well, let me just say this. Uh, we here, we, we try to stay away from, you know, attacking individuals and principles above personalities, but Nilo far, your question is excellent in that it's not just cats, it's cats, it's monkeys, it's mice, and it's also dogs. Now this is little Wednesday. She is my Beagle mix, but the reason why they use Beagles is because Beagles are so, so gentle and forgiving.

12:26 And this little one is a very, very gentle, gentle baby. So tell us a little bit about, we've covered cat torture. Let's talk a little bit about the way the U S government is funding dog torture. Absolutely. You said, and Jane, you said it, why Beagles? Why? Because they're docile and they take the, they take the abuse. They're better specimens to take the punishment in the lab. That's why, you know, our first time, our first full year at the white coat waste project was 2016. It, it, it was a, again, I, I had, I was working, uh, before that and in, in, in another career.

13:16 And, but, but we went full time, full time, became a full time organisation in 2016. So it hasn't been around that long, not even, not even a decade of full-time work. Well, our very first full time, uh, effort, the very first campaign we launched was for dogs, not cats. And in, it was November of 2016, our very first public policy effort was, was it was, it was an investigation called spending to death, spending to death, an audit and an investigation of what the government was doing to the Beagles and the dogs across the agencies, the NIH, the defence department, uh, the CDC, the FDA, and the veterans administration.

13:59 Now in that report lay the seeds for some of the, for some of the most historic campaigns for dogs of the last 50 years in that report back in 2016, we had the, uh, the Beagle gate sand flies, at least one of them in that report at the time, the NIH, uh, whether feeding the dogs, the Beagles to the sand flies, letting them, uh, eat them alive. That was in that report as of 20, as of November, 2016. And so was, so was an investigation of what they were doing to the dogs at the DA at the department of veterans affairs. So that little report that we put out, the Washington post covered, uh, and countless others in that report, lay the seeds for the most important campaigns to save dogs, uh, in the last five decades, that little report late spring, uh, was the jumping off point for our campaign to expose and close all of the dog labs across the department of veterans affairs.

14:55 And, uh, that was a five-year campaign from 2017 to 2022 that effectively annihilated dog testing, uh, uh, where they were in Milwaukee, in Cleveland, in Richmond, again, coast to Los Angeles, coast to coast, clean them all out, which we did. Uh, and that campaign was one of the most effective, I think it was the most effective campaign for dogs, uh, in American history. So let me ask you a question. Here I am, we know we don't have tails, we don't have paws. If this little girl eats chocolate, she gets poisoned. Uh, you know, I eat chocolate, unfortunately a little too much.

15:36 Um, but the point is that you see how docile she is. She's yawning already. What are their justifications for these torturous experiments? Like how do they justify this? How do they convince, uh, the heads of these agencies to, or Congress to give them money? They've adopted this. Give me, give me, give me culture. Give me, give me, give me. They're always starving. They're always hungry for more money always. And the answer to your question is started the same year I was working in the lab back in 1995 is when this, the modern, I consider the modern birth of this virulent, virulent resurgence of animal testing at taxpayer expense started in the, in, in 1995, you had this unholy Alliance of Democrats and Republicans.

16:28 Both sides are guilty of this boat. Uh, back in, back in, you know, 95, give or take about 30 years ago, they came together, Jane. And they both said, looking around the world, looking around the country. Okay. We have legitimate human diseases out there. We have an ageing population. We have some real problems and let's throw money at the problem. Let's throw money at the problem. So both sides started inflating and ballooning the budgets for places like the NIH, which has since more than tripled, uh, in, in, in budget since, since I, the same time I was working in a lab, they started doubling, tripling and more for agencies like the national institutes of health.

17:15 Why is that a problem? Because places like the NIH spend 50 cents on the dollar for every dollar you give them 50 cents of it is going to abuse cats like, like my Delilah here. So it's not hard to see how this problem happened. It's if I give you a dollar and you're spending half of it on animal testing, and then I give you $2 and then I give you $4. Okay. That's how this all started. And so what'd they do? I mean, again, you have, you have places like the NIH, the veterans administration, the U S department of agriculture, her lab, they all went around had in hand and took advantage of, of these politicians.

17:55 They took advantage of these lawmakers and they went around and saying, just give me more. I'll, I'll cure it this time. Just give me more. We'll get it this time. But as you pointed out, dogs eat chalk, dogs eat chocolate, they'll die. You eat chalk. Well, you know, or they'll get really sick. You eat chocolate. It's a good afternoon. Maybe it's not good, but it's an snack. Right. You're not a dog. I'm not a cat. We're different. This stuff is incredibly wasteful. It doesn't really work on people, but government does what government always does. They throw money at the problem. They have one move spend, spend. And what we're trying to do is put the genie back in the bottle.

18:38 Now it's up to us now to go around and start defunding these programmes because they've spun out of control. I think you're making incredible points. We've got yet another caller, Annie in Sherman Oaks, your question or thought for Anthony Bilotti, the founder and president of White Coat Waste. Oh my, thank you so much, Jane, for having this show. Incredibly powerful. And Anthony, wow. I love White Coat Waste. You expose so much. This is a very near and dear to my heart because I studied psychology and in the department, they literally demand that we have to participate in these programmes.

19:19 In addition to what I volunteered in the health department, they required it as a community service to support all these experiments on the animals in the name of cancer, in the name of, you know, supposed cancer solution, heart disease and Alzheimer's, et cetera, et cetera. And I used to be so good at it. I was team captain when I was blind to the reality, but I didn't want to participate in animal testing, which is another story for another day. It's a nightmare. But how can we stop these universities lumped over millions of dollars flowing in their pockets?

19:59 These are crimes that go from our pocket, our tax money to torture animals so that universities could gloat with all that money and constantly repurpose students. You're right. You made a very good point. Universities are a big part of the problem. They really want the money. It helps the university. In other words, they take a cut. You've got these university scientists living in their McMansions. They're making money. And it's, I mean, honestly, it's a money -making machine, you know, money corrupts and that's, it's legal corruption.

20:46 It's incentivised. It's policy. And that's how they put new wings on the school. That's how they balance the books. So you have universities who are going into the animal testing business because that's what it is. It's a business. So they're going into it, as she just explained, as you pointed out there, because it's lucrative. The answer to your question is again, defund it. If a programme can be funded, it can be defunded. That's what we're doing. You have to go after the root cause. If you want to tackle animal testing, you must go after wasteful government spending.

21:27 It's not enough to just protest the labs. It's not enough to just name and shame these professors. It doesn't work. It's not enough. You have to cut the purse strings. If you're not going after the funding source, you're not going to be able to make a real impact. I'm telling you, that's the secret sauce. So the answer to this question, whether it's done in the federal government or funded by the federal government in these schools and universities, Jane's playing some videos of, again, that we've uncovered that are happening in the campuses, in the colleges themselves. Again, you got to cut the purse strings. So for example, one of the ways we're doing that, we're backing a new piece of federal legislation right now called the PAW Act, the Preventing Animal Abuse and Waste Act.

22:15 Preventing Animal Abuse and Waste Act to completely strip every single red cent that's funded or run by the National Institutes of Health for dog and cat tests. This is the kind of policy we need. We're also working in appropriations right now. So not just with a standalone permanent legislation, but in the budget, the budget process. Right now, we're making progress with getting language to cut the purse strings for the VA, for the NIH and get accountability. So that's the name of the game. It's a money game. You can't talk about animal testing unless you talk about wasteful spending.

22:55 Now, I just read a fascinating article in BuzzFeed that absolutely blew my mind. I was aware, but I wasn't really aware how much white coat waste was behind the whole controversy over the Wuhan Virology Lab. Now, we could do an entire four podcasts on this whole thing. So not to dive too deep, but obviously there was a pandemic. The first shots were of the wet market in Wuhan, China that had all sorts of animals together, faeces and blood and pus, and that was the prime suspect.

23:36 And then it turned out that there's a lab also in Wuhan where they're doing tests, or they were doing tests. And the government of the United States was funding some of these tests. You blew that story out of the water by getting Freedom of Information Act requests, getting that information, and all of a sudden it was global headlines. Now, let me say, we still don't culturally, societally, we haven't said, okay, here's where it happened. Because it's very hard to go into the past, even with murder cases that seem open and shut.

24:16 I was a prime reporter for 40 years. It seems pretty obvious who the culprit is, but if they're not convicted beyond a reasonable doubt, you can't say they're guilty. So we still don't know for certain where it started. In the Wuhan market, where all these animals were being for food, or in the Wuhan lab, where the animals were being tortured for so-called science. But either way, animal torture is behind the pandemic that disrupted our lives and killed so many people. And yet the media does not talk about that, Anthony. Yeah, it's true. And I'll do you one better. The cat on my lap is responsible.

24:58 Her and my other departed, little petite, the other cat from the USDA. Let's see Delilah a little bit, because she's out of frame. Come on. Come on, baby. Or just, all you have to do is lower your screen a little bit from your, yeah. If you lower your screen, there we go. That's Delilah. She escaped. Well, she was rescued by Anthony's white coat waist from one of the labs. Tell the story. Thank you, Anthony. And the reason the world knows that US taxpayers funded that Wuhan lab, the reason they even know that, that Fauci funded the lab, the NIH funded all of that, the reason they know that is because of this cat.

25:43 This cat changed the world. Let me explain. You see, the kitten slaughterhouse at the US Department of Agriculture wasn't just abusing animals here. They were abusing animals over there in China too. We found out that, again, she was a breeder and 22 of her kittens were slaughtered and incinerated in those toxoplasmosis tests. But we found out, working with whistleblowers, working with Freedom of Information Act, working with our investigative research, that the US Department of Agriculture was also, for many years, rounding up cat and dog meat in China at the wet markets, bringing it back to its lab in Maryland, where she was born and abused and trapped, and feeding cat and dog meat to the kittens in the lab.

26:43 So think about that for a minute. Think about that for a minute. Dog and cat meat abroad, taxpayer-funded animal testing at home. They were doing cannibalism experiments. Well, in 2019, in March of 2019, right before we shut down her lab, we blew the whistle on this, exposed it. It was on the cover of everything, Time magazine, the BBC, NBC News, everywhere, and took down her lab. Her lab was shut down after the scandal. She came out. I adopted her. But here's the thing. In 2019, one year before the pandemic, White Coat Waste investigators were on the trail in China.

27:26 We were on the trail of what our government was doing over there. And immediately after saving her life and little Petit's life, we asked, what else is our government funding over there? Because this can't be the only thing. That's how we knew about the Wuhan lab. And I believe it was 27 other labs in China at the time, not just Wuhan. And we had it. We had the goods. We had the information before anyone else because of her. And the world owes these cats a great deal of gratitude for this expose. We never would have known about that had we not already been on the trail of our government's animal abuse in China, because that's what we're talking about, Jane, the Wuhan lab.

28:11 Even if it's innocent of starting the pandemic, it is guilty of taxpayer-funded torture. The Wuhan lab is an animal lab. It is an animal testing lab that was funded by our National Institutes of Health. They were abusing bats, rounding them up, wild animals, trapping them. You know what happens when you trap a wild animal in a cage and transport her in thousands of miles? They don't like it very much. It's not very humane. They were doing fear experiments with electro-shocking animals, electro-shocking their paws. They were working with humanised mice. They were genetically manipulating mice to have the lungs like humans, so they could do gain -of-function research.

29:00 Gain-of-function research is animal research. It's just code for animal research. And they were abusing everything, primates, pigs, bats, you name it. That's why we got involved with it, because it's taxpayer-funded animal testing. And it's a campaign that's since changed the world, because Wuhan is not alone. Our government funds many animal labs around the world. Worldwide waste. I'm very proud that the White Coat Waste Project blew the whistle on all of this and got all of this started, because just a year after that, we put out another investigation showing that we were also funding more cat experiments in Russia.

29:44 Now, I want to jump into that. We could talk about this, like I say, several podcasts, but we've got another caller. Sophia in California, your question or thought for Anthony Bilotti, head of White Coat Waste. Yes. Hi. Thanks for having me. I am just thoroughly disgusted. This is a holocaust against these little innocent animals. I'm a cat lover. I have a few kitties of my own, and just the mere thought of it sickens me to the core.

30:24 This should be considered an act of terrorism against animals worldwide. It's so unnecessary, and the products that these people are using for animal testing, animals don't use them. It's humans who consume these products and make billions of dollars from their corporations. It's got to stop. There needs to be some sanctions in place. What I mean is punishments. They all need to be widely exposed, these countries, their labs, everything. Follow the money. Expose them. This should be a nonstop campaign against this. There's no need for this. In this day and age of technology, again, they can replace all the animal testing with technology that could do a simulation if they have to.

31:13 Sophia, I want to thank you, and I feel and hear your outrage. That outrage is shared by millions of Americans. Americans and people around the world, frankly, consider themselves animal lovers. Yet, it seems like it's carte blanche for animal torture. All you have to do is say the word science. One of the reasons, according to other experts I've spoken with, is that the National Institutes of Health is run by vivisectors. Now, there was the Dr. Collins who resigned or retired, and there was hope that the person who replaced him might be less of a vivisector.

31:54 In other words, if you want to stop vivisection, don't put vivisectors in charge of billions of dollars of funding. Has there been any progress made? We're in the 21st century. We have organs on a chip. I don't even understand why they want to remain in this mediaeval state of doing these backward experiments that are really 19th century. This is not the 21st century. I don't get it. I would just be ashamed more than anything else. I would be filled with shame that I lack the imagination or the intelligence to do smarter experiments. No question about it.

32:35 No question about it. I mean, it's if you put Fox in charge of the henhouse, right? I mean, they're going to put vivisectors in charge of stuff. That's what they know. That's what they do. Why is it that every paper I see, every single one has the same so-called scientific paper from a vivisector, has the same conclusion? More research is necessary. Translation, more money is necessary. Well, follow the science is not what we do here. We follow the money, as the caller right before us so appropriately said, follow the money. That's what we do here. And there is progress, Jane.

33:17 There is room. I'm more optimistic than I've ever been. I'm more optimistic than I've ever been because I think this organisation has reoriented the focus right back where it belongs, which is the money. Follow the darn money. At the NIH, in appropriations this year, we're working on language to hold them accountable, get more spending reports, hold them accountable for that money. We've got legislation. The PAW Act, I mentioned, the Preventing Animal Abuse. How is that doing? How is that doing? It's doing great. Well, I mean, we're working to pass it, but we just got it.

33:58 We just introduced that, Nancy Mace and Congressman Moskowitz, but we're getting good bipartisan support, but there's more work to be done. We've got to pass the bill. And so we're working both to pass bills like that and also appropriations work, not just at the NIH. The NIH is the biggest, but at the VA, the Veterans Administration. We just cleaned out the lab. We cleaned out the dog labs. Then we cleaned out the cat labs and we're working to get insurance as well with appropriations language, which we passed back in March to mandate, to eliminate that the VA eliminates its dog, cat, and monkey tests, all of them, all of them by 2026.

34:42 That had never happened before. Let me jump in and show this. US Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Okay. This is the guy in charge of Veterans Affairs and you have a famous case versus the Stokes Seven. Explain. Yeah. Yeah. So as we mentioned in the call earlier before, we started with the dogs. We started with the dogs and we won. We knocked out the dog testing at the VA in Los Angeles. We knocked it out in Cleveland. We knocked it out in Milwaukee. We knocked it out in Richmond. We annihilated it. We zeroed it out. Then we moved to the cats. We cleaned out their cat lab in Los Angeles.

35:23 We cleaned out the cat lab in Cleveland. We cleaned out the cat lab in Louisville, Kentucky for the VA. So we had zeroed them out there too. Then last summer, our investigators did a Freedom of Information Act request and we exposed that VA Secretary McDonough, a White House cabinet member, had personally authorised another round, a new round. He wanted to bring back another round of painful testing on seven cats at the Cleveland lab, the Stokes, the name of the lab, the Stokes Veterans Lab. We waged a very, very hard fought battle over the last 12 months.

36:08 We ran ads that reached 4 million pet owners and taxpayers. We hundreds and hundreds of thousands of emails and phone calls from coast to coast. People in both parties were pissed off about this. Republicans and Democrats united to send McDonough a message, do not bring this test back on the seven cats. These cats were going to be, they were risking paralysis. They were risking death, pain. You've shown some images from that cat lab, the little orange cat Copper. There he is. This poor cat was a victim at the Stokes lab. This cat underwent experiments that made him pee blood.

36:55 They implanted devices in him via remote control. He urinated blood via remote control and they killed him. They ended his life, but we ended their money. We ended their lab and we got justice for Copper. We beat McDonough. We just announced victory and they admitted that they cancelled the protocol and it's done. Well, I got to say, yeah, not good as an understatement when it comes to these experiments. You are extraordinary. You're a tiny little organisation. You have very little overhead. I urge everybody support White Coat Waste.

37:36 I have donated to White Coat Waste as an individual because I know the money goes right into this action. What you leverage with your pretty small organisation is absolutely extraordinary. So everybody get on whitecoatwaste.org and start donating because they can't do it alone and they need some funding. Now let me go back to the whole Wuhan thing because that's how you ended up basically making global news. You've broken down various experiments, but that puts you on the map as it were.

38:17 So essentially, when this whole pandemic started, and I'll never forget, I was watching CNN and I saw a reporter actually show the wet market and they were walking through the wet market. It was a breaking news story. They think it started here. It seems like a pretty obvious thing. There's been other pandemics and zoonotic diseases that have started in other wet markets. And so I saw the images of that horrible wet market in Wuhan with all sorts of animals, domestic animals, live animals, dying animals, faeces and pus and blood.

39:00 Of course. But then to everybody's shock and horror, oh, there's a lab also in Wuhan, China, where they're doing what they call gain of function experiments. Tell us about that and how you broke that story. Absolutely. Remember, right here, this little cat, she's not a little cat, but she's my cat, and Delilah here, and Petit, who's not with us. They were breeding specimens at the USDA to eat cats who were coming from those wet markets in China. Our government was forced feeding kittens in the lab, cannibalism experiments, in these disgusting, heinous, and wasteful toxoplasmosis tests.

39:51 We knew about the wet markets in 2019. We exposed it. We knew that labs occasionally in China were even recycling spent lab animals and sending them to the wet markets. So there was even a connection between the two. And we knew, again, because our investigators immediately turned its focus to foreign animal labs after we saved Delilah, that the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Wuhan University, there were two Wuhan labs, as well as 27 other Chinese labs, were all on the NIH payroll. Well, you mentioned a moment in time in early 2020.

40:35 In January of 2020, it wasn't even a pandemic yet. It was an epidemic in China, the local thing. Well, I was in the White House. Justin Goodman, our senior vice president, who has been on the show many times, he was with me. So was Louise Linton, an advisory board member. We were at the Trump White House at the time in January 2020, and we were there to do a meeting with them about the federal animal testing problem. And we were meeting with them about all the different things we work on, dogs, cats, monkeys, et cetera. But one of the issues on the table in that meeting we had with the Trump White House in January, two months before it was a pandemic, was about this lab in Wuhan and the other labs in China that the NIH was paying for.

41:27 And we warned them and said, you see these news reports about Wuhan? Turns out it's on the payroll. Unfortunately, they didn't do anything at the time. And Justin and I were like, well, we've got to get the word out about this. This is like news. I mean, people are getting sick. It seems like it's going to come here soon. And in April of 2020, we fired the shot heard around the world. Over Easter Sunday of 2020, we put out an investigation in the Daily Mail, with a paraphrase in the headline here, but the US government gives $3.7 million to Lab Week Centre.

42:08 And that's how the world learned that we paid for probably our own pandemic. And it all comes back to animal testing. It's all about animal testing. Again, I believe that President Biden's FBI and Department of Energy believe that that's where it started from. Not everybody believes that. Most people in the country now do, not everybody. But look, it doesn't matter. At the end of the day, like I said, even if the Wuhan lab is innocent of starting the pandemic, it's guilty of taxpayer funded torture. And that's why we got involved.

42:48 No other reason. That's what we did, stop taxpayer funded animal testing. You would think that that would be a wake up call. You would think that it's just like with climate change and animal agriculture. You could make a very strong argument that the US government, and this is a bipartisan issue, doesn't matter what administration, it's just ongoing. The Farm Bill goes for five years, and they're negotiating it again. They're subsidising the meat and dairy industry. The average cheap burger that you get at a fast food joint would cost so much more if the US government didn't subsidise the crops that these animals are fed, the animals lost when there's hurricanes and storms and floods and fires, the pandemics where the US government subsidises just wiping, baking animals to death.

43:43 And yet they're talking about how they're fighting fossil fuels while they're funding another leading cause of climate change, which is animal agriculture. So that's one side. And then you have on the other side, the government funding these labs that may very well have been the source of the pandemic. It's insanity. Yeah. You talk about absolutely insanity. Stop the money, stop the madness. That's our slogan for a reason. It's madness. Stop the money, stop the madness. The fact that we might have even paid for our own pandemic is bananas.

44:29 But to go back to you, you also made another point about what else our government is funding. Well, Delilah's Lab, the USR Department of Agriculture. I'll never forget when I found out that they had a cat lab. Justin Goodman called me. I was in a concert with my parents in New York City. I had my phone on mute. I was in Carnegie Hall and I was listening to classical music. And I came out and I saw like 15 urgent phone calls from Justin. And I call him back and he's like, you'll never believe this. The US Department of Agriculture has a cat lab. And I go, say that again?

45:10 They have cats. USDA? Agriculture? You mean like pigs, farm animals, right? No, cats. And I go, why? Well, we had just gotten the Freedom of Information Act request back. And we learned from that investigation that they were doing rotten meat experiments as a handout, a corporate handout for the meat industry. They were doing these rotten meat, feeding the cats rotten meat, toxoplasmosis-infected meat, more government waste. And it was a corporate handout all along that US taxpayers were funding.

45:53 Well, there's waste everywhere. But that call I got from Justin that day turned out to be more important than I ever knew. And I could have realised because if it wasn't for that call, we wouldn't have dug into the USDA. If we didn't dig into the USDA, we wouldn't have shut down the largest cat lab in the United States federal government, save Delilah. If we didn't shut that down, we would never have exposed and uncovered that US taxpayers funded the Wuhan lab. If we hadn't done that campaign, we wouldn't have exposed that the NIH was funding hundreds and hundreds of other labs, spent $2 billion all around the world. If we hadn't done that, we wouldn't have been able to expose and enclose the NIH funding for cat labs in Russia, which we successfully did.

46:39 We wouldn't have been able to pass the first public policies to retire and release the survivors in the federal government. Just earlier this year, following my cat's passing, we shut down an attempt by the NIH to resurrect and rebuild the kitten slaughter house. Five years later, they were trying to rebuild it at the UC Davis. We shut that one down too. On what grounds? On what grounds? What does it prove? Nothing, nothing. They were doing those experiments, like I said, for nearly 50 years. Nothing to show for it, nothing at all. Corporate handouts, taxpayer weight, nothing.

47:19 A lot of dead cats we got. 5,000 cats, dogs, and other animals in that body count that were piled up. Nothing to show for it, nothing. Five decades of madness, and then they wanted to rebuild it and resurrect it at the University of California, Davis. I just want to point out, we just interviewed PETA the other day about their campaign to stop a massive monkey lab that they're trying to build in Georgia, in a little town in Georgia. The people of Bainbridge, Georgia have stood up and said, hell no. They filed lawsuits. They want to bring in 30,000 monkeys.

48:01 It's just beyond comprehension, Anthony. We're in the 21st century, and we're driving some of these species into extinction, kidnapping them from the wild. I have to ask you, how are the politicians in Congress reacting? Because let's face it, most of the members of Congress are just running scared. They don't want to get involved in any controversies. I've experienced it myself. You try to talk to them about an issue and, oh, I got to run, I got to run. They just don't want to get pinned down on anything. How have you been able to get them involved? Because a lot of them, they just want to get reelected, and they just want to stay as far away from stuff like this as possible.

48:48 Yeah. Look, I had a head start in that. Again, I went into my professional training in my former life before I got ... I learned the secret sauce. I learned how Washington works. Remember, I went into the professional campaign business for a reason. I wanted to learn how the system works, and I wanted to learn what messages resonated. I was also concerned when I started White Coat Waste. Let's be honest. It wasn't a bipartisan effort, the effort to battle to end animal testing. Animal testing is an old issue in this country.

49:28 It's been going on for many years. In fact, Jane, it's been going on since the reconstruction after the Civil War. That's a long time. But I wasn't too happy with the state of the campaigns we were running. They didn't look very bipartisan to me. Let's be honest. They were dominated by one side, and there was no reason for that. Power comes from the centre. It doesn't come from the right. It doesn't come from the left. If you want to make impact in this country on any issue at all, that's my life's work, animal testing, one issue. But if you want to make an impact, you better find a way to recalibrate the issue to the centre, to the 50-yard line. That means getting Democrats and Republicans, both sides. That's how winning is done.

50:09 It's not done with one party, because if you only got one party working with you, good luck when the political winds blow. I have no idea what's going to happen in Washington. Let me try to say this. Yes. Leaving electoral politics aside, I think you were extremely clever in appealing to the traditional Republican argument, which is reduce government spending and wasteful government spending. A lot of times it has to do with other issues, but that is a mantra and a theme, and you went in there and used that. Tell us about that. Absolutely. I wanted to get both sides.

50:51 I don't care. We don't care as an organisation why members of Congress shut down cat labs like hers. I don't care. I don't care if they love cats. I would prefer it if they loved cats. I got into this issue myself because I didn't like animal abuse. Remember, when I was 17 years old, I didn't know about taxpayer funding, and I definitely wasn't paying taxes at 17, income taxes, that kind of thing. Animal abuse is what got me into it. Animal abuse is my motivation, but at the end of the day, impact is more important than intent.

51:33 Animals care about winning, and if I can get Republicans or Democrats to do the right thing, who cares why? Who cares? That's what it's about. I agree, but how did you do it? How did you do it? Well, the answer is I did my homework. Before White Coat Waste was a full-time organisation, I spent a year on my own, just lunch breaks at work, weekends, nights, putting in an extraordinary amount of time doing my homework. I looked at public opinion polling. I studied the issue, and I looked at the arguments and the polling and the political polling and the public opinion polling.

52:18 What motivates people to move their opinion on this issue? I also realised that, again, if I can move them on the wasteful government spending message, not only am I going to get them to vote the right way in Congress and build a new coalition that's, again, at the 50-yard line right down the middle, D's and R's, but at the same time, I would deprive the enemy of a vital source of money, a vital source of funding. When the money is gone, the vivisectors are gone, too. I realised we were onto something with this, and that's how it happened. Cut the waste.

52:59 I love it. Again, very happy to report that we've already gotten a donation from Nilo Farr, who said she's donating. We urge everybody, if you're disgusted, so many people say, I'm disgusted by this, visit whitecoatwaste .org. Even if you're a $5 a month monthly donor, every little bit adds up. How do I know that? Because I also run my own nonprofit, Unshamed TV, which is a 501c3 nonprofit. I do not take a salary. We are mostly volunteer run. We also need your help. I wanted to say that what our mission is, is to cover stories that are not getting mainstream media coverage.

53:49 Now, you broke through, Anthony. You took the biggest story of our time, the pandemic, and connected it to animal abuse, and you made global headlines. Unbelievable. Fantastic work. But so many of these other stories, and people are even asking, why isn't this a bigger story? A lot of the smaller things, the big stories that you've done in terms of shutting down smaller labs or other labs, they're not getting the headlines. And that's why we cover that stuff. So I also hope that you support Unshamed TV. And to that end, let me tell you just a little bit about Unshamed TV and the work that we do.

54:33 So it's a vegan Netflix. Okay. That's the craziest thing I've ever heard. I love Unshamed TV. Unshamed. Unshamed TV. Your life will change. It's just that easy. Unshamed TV has all sorts of content for everybody. Unshamed TV changed my life. Unshamed TV is crushing it. I love Unshamed TV. Unshamed TV is my go-to. Unshamed TV. Who knew? Unshamed, baby. Yeah. And Nila Farsh said she donated $500 to white coat waste just now.

55:13 Absolutely amazing. I want to thank you, Anthony. You are doing incredible work, surgical strikes on this completely pathetic, unnecessary, wasteful, cruel, morally bankrupt industry. Together we can end it. Everybody, please visit white coat waste, get involved. And I will see you next time right here on Unshamed.