If you think that animal experiments are essential to saving human lives, it’s time to think again. Each year billions of dollars and millions of animals are used in cruel, wasteful and irrelevant research that has little to nothing to do with advancing human health.

The American public should be outraged by this inhumane and fraudulent use of animal life. Which is why IDA has created the “Outragies Awards” to highlight the bogus use of animals in cruel, repetitive and wasteful research.

Awarded to the “Top Ten Most Outrageous Animal Experiments,” the awards, based on publications released in 2012, highlight stupid, cruel and truly outrageous research, like inflicting suffering on baby rats to study “child abuse,” (Most Outrageously Heartless), giving hallucinogenic drugs to monkeys to create an animal “model” of schizophrenia, (Most Outrageously Superfluous), and hanging mice upside down by their tails to study “depression.” (Most Outrageously Depraved).

Honestly. You can’t make this stuff up. One experiment pumped nicotine into pregnant mice to demonstrate that – surprise – the babies had lung damage. We gave that one the Most Outrageously Inexcusable Award.

The Most Outrageously Cruel award went to scientists who took tiny newborn monkeys, as young as two weeks old, and exposed them to open brain surgery for four day procedures before killing them. They claim they are tracing the pathways of visual nerve cells. And if that’s not upsetting enough, these kinds of experiments on monkeys have been going on in this very lab for nearly 25 years.

When does it stop? The junk science highlighted in IDA’s Outragies Awards should serve as a wake-up call to the American public, and to legislators. The billions of dollars poured into animal experiments constitute a crisis in fiscal irresponsibility, and an outrageous betrayal of people and animals.

They say knowledge is power. Hopefully the more we can inform the public and expose this atrocity – this outrage – the closer we’ll come to seeing it ended.