
Tommy Washbush
The Food Research Institute building.
The mission of UW-Madison’s Food Research Institute is to ‘enhance the safety of the food supply.’
In one experiment funded by the UW-Madison’s Food Research Institute (FRI), the animal rights group PETA says mice “were force-fed the parasite-infested feces of other mice.” The resulting paper, “Using Entamoeba muris To Model Fecal-Oral Transmission of Entamoeba in Mice,” published in a scientific journal in 2023, says the mice were later euthanized. A UW spokesperson refutes PETA's characterization, saying "researchers purify the parasites out of the feces of host animals, discard the fecal matter and inoculate study animals with the parasites alone."
Another FRI-funded study that caught PETA’s attention involved feeding pregnant monkeys whipping cream contaminated with listeria bacteria, then cutting them open so their dead babies could be dissected. (See “Acute Fetal Demise with First Trimester Maternal Infection Resulting from Listeria monocytogenes in a Nonhuman Primate Model,” published in 2017.)
PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has repeatedly cited these studies in its campaign to compel the FRI, an industry-supported campus entity that works to protect food safety, to stop using animals in research. In a May 22 letter to FRI director Charles Kaspar, the group asserts that its campaign is working.
The letter from Frances Cheng, a senior science adviser for PETA’s Laboratory Investigations Department, says 15 of FRI’s corporate sponsors, after hearing from PETA, have either stopped funding the research center entirely or shifted their sponsorship to a new fund that cannot be used for animal testing. The letter urges FRI to end animal research altogether, saying “numerous studies show that animal testing is unscientific and does not advance public health or safeguard food safety.” It also notes that several federal agencies have announced “groundbreaking new initiatives to transition away from animal testing.”
In response to emailed questions from Isthmus, Cheng says PETA contacted nearly all of the institute’s 58 corporate sponsors as identified on a list obtained through a public records request. (This list, she says, was previously published on the FRI website but taken down in 2023 “after we started contacting” the companies on it.)
According to Cheng, two companies — Good Foods Group and Coca-Cola — have “pulled funding of FRI completely due to our efforts.” An additional 13, including the Campbell Soup Co. and PepsiCo — now give through the recently created “Food Research Institute Programmatic (Non-animal) Support Fund.”
Cheng says it’s clear from released correspondence records that the UW-Madison “created this new fund in response to PETA pressure. You can see that sponsors asked FRI how to respond to our request to restrict their funding at FRI away from animal testing, but there previously wasn’t a mechanism for FRI to do so. So the university created this new fund to accommodate their sponsors’ requests.”
Kaspar, in an email exchange, essentially confirms this: “The Food Research Institute has always been receptive to the goals and priorities of its sponsors, and we have accommodated some sponsors that wish to continue to support FRI but prefer their donations not be used for animal research.”
Cheng, in her letter to Kaspar, says efforts to persuade other sponsors to eschew animal research are ongoing, and that “it appears to be only a matter of time before all of them stop supporting FRI’s animal testing.”
The use of animals in research is also under fire from the Trump administration — above and beyond its slashing of federal support for all things science. In April, three federal agencies — the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency — all put out statements calling for phasing out animal-based research.
In a news release, the NIH says it is on a path to develop and use “cutting-edge alternative non-animal research models.” Argues Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of NIH, “This human-based approach will accelerate innovation, improve healthcare outcomes, and deliver life-changing treatments.”
Kaspar says these agency directives concern drug testing, which FRI does not perform: “I am unaware of any policy directives related to FRI’s work” of protecting food safety. But Cheng counters that “some of FRI’s experiments are focused on food toxicity, and FDA’s potential change in test requirements in that area can affect FRI’s use of animals for food testing.” She adds that any decrease in NIH funding for animal testing “will surely affect FRI as well.”
Dr. Eric Sandgren, a professor emeritus at the UW-Madison who headed the university’s animal research operations for a decade, ending in 2016, calls these directives “nothing new.” Researchers, he says, have for some time been moving away from the use of animals as other models have become viable. “This just formalizes something that’s happening already.”
Sandgren, who still serves on the School of Veterinary Medicine’s animal care and use committee, says animal models are still needed for some complicated research questions. For this reason, he thinks the Trump agency directives “probably won’t have a particularly big effect on most of the research that’s done in Madison, because it isn’t the type that can be replaced yet.”
Sandgren takes issue with the federal agencies’ claim that moving away from animal research will speed up the pace of research and reduce costs. “Well, you don’t know that yet,” he cautions. “I mean, probably it will. It’s aspirational. That’s why they’re doing it. They think now is the time where it might help. If we knew for a fact that would speed things up, we would have done it earlier.”
Interestingly, the activity PETA is now taking victory laps over — urging businesses to sever their ties with entities involved in animal research — is at the heart of a local lawsuit filed in mid-April against animal rights activists. Ridglan Farms, a dog breeding and research facility in southwestern Dane County, is seeking damages from activists who have contacted the companies it does business with to inform them that Ridglan is under investigation by an appointed special prosecutor for alleged violations of state animal cruelty laws.
“Dane4Dogs’ actions amount to extortion: stop doing business with Ridglan Farms or we will publicly shame you,” the lawsuit alleges. “Accordingly, such actions have no legal justification.” Dane4Dogs has until mid-June to file its response.
UW-Madison received $457 million in funding from the NIH last year, a university official recently told The Badger Herald. The specific amount that involves animal research is not disclosed but likely runs in the tens of millions.
Sandgren says a survey he conducted in 2014 found that roughly 20% of research dollars coming into the UW-Madison went to studies that involved an animal research component. “And maybe half of that actually goes to animal research, so that would be 10% of what came in.”
In its 2023 annual report to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the UW-Madison’s Research Animal Resource Center says the university used more than 4,600 animals for research that year, including 1,044 non-human primates (monkeys), 1,467 hamsters, 172 rabbits and 608 pigs. (The center, which Sangren headed, has since rebranded as Research Animal Resources and Compliance, preserving its acronym, RARC.)
The institute’s fee structure is based on its sponsors’ annual volume of food sales, with corporate sponsors giving between a minimum of $2,500 and a maximum of $34,000 per year. Kaspar estimates FRI’s annual budget to be around $1 million, of which maybe a third is distributed to eight-to-11 investigators for food safety research. He says the amount used in projects involving animals ranges from zero dollars some years to up to $30,000 in other years. The animals used are most commonly mice.
Kaspar insists that “UW–Madison scientists study animals only when there is no alternative available” and that “FRI-affiliated researchers” are working to develop alternatives. But for now, he says, animal research remains “an important way to learn about the biology of contaminants like Listeria monocytogenes and other harmful microbes and to prevent potentially deadly infections.”
Cheng, in response, says “there are many animal-free test methods that have been developed to assess the microbes that he referred to,” citing examples in scientific literature.
While the specific experiments flagged in PETA’s outreach efforts, including the mice eating feces infected by parasites and the pregnant monkeys whose babies were fatally infected, are no longer going on, Cheng says these are “just a subset of all the animal experiments FRI contributes to. FRI uses thousands of animals per year, and there likely are ongoing projects.” A report obtained by PETA shows the FRI used 3,614 mice in testing last year.
Cheng is optimistic that federally funded research involving animals will ultimately be phased out, especially in light of the new federal directives, so long as “the political will for the paradigm shift remains long enough to take root.” As she sees it, “The writing is on the wall that animal-free methods are clearly the direction science as a whole is moving in, but FRI seems to want to cling to that last straw until some clear directives order it to stop animal testing.”
[Editor's note: This story has been updated to remove a disputed characterization of an experiment by UW-Madison's Food Research Institute.]