These horses already gave their bodies to the racing industry. They carried jockeys, absorbed the physical punishment of competition, and generated profit for owners and tracks across the country. When their racing days ended, they deserved pastures, not laboratories.

Instead, a Cornell University lab funded by the National Institutes of Health is artificially inseminating retired racehorses, deliberately terminating their pregnancies weeks later, inserting tubes through their cervixes to extract embryos, and dissecting those embryos for research. Mares as young as four and as old as 22 are involved. Approximately 80 horses are expected to endure these procedures over the course of the project. And when the experiments are done, grant documents reveal that horses who cannot be rehomed may be euthanized.

This program received $924,002 in taxpayer funding in June 2025 and is expected to receive an additional $3.6 million, running through 2030. It was funded months after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. publicly promised dramatic reductions in NIH animal testing. That promise has not been kept. And the horses bearing the cost of that broken promise have no voice to demand otherwise.

The connection between the racing industry and this laboratory is not incidental. It is a pipeline. Horses used for profit on the track are being transferred directly into laboratories for further exploitation, with no legal protection standing between their retirement and their next use as research subjects. A horse that has already given years of its body to human entertainment should not face invasive reproductive experiments as its reward for surviving that service.

Representative Dina Titus of Nevada has already called on NIH to cancel the tests. White Coat Waste, whose previous investigations led to major victories for lab animals at the CDC, EPA, Department of Defense, and Department of Veterans Affairs, uncovered this program through Freedom of Information Act requests because NIH did not disclose it voluntarily. Taxpayers are funding these experiments. They deserve to know about them. And they deserve the opportunity to demand their money not be spent this way.

Horses are not disposable research tools. They are sentient beings capable of feeling pain, forming bonds, and deserving to live with dignity. A retired racehorse is not raw material waiting to be repurposed. It is an animal that has already given enough.

Sign this petition to demand NIH immediately cancel the Cornell University miscarriage experiment program and redirect its funding toward humane retirement and rehoming for the horses involved, call on Congress to establish legal protections preventing retired racehorses from being transferred to research facilities, and require NIH to publicly disclose all animal testing programs so that taxpayers can hold the agency accountable for the commitments its officials make.