White Coat Waste has released a new investigation documenting more than $1.1 million in National Science Foundation funding for experiments on captive coyotes at a U.S. Department of Agriculture facility in Utah.
The experiments, conducted in collaboration with Utah State University neuroscientist Sara Freeman, focus on the behavioral, hormonal, and neural basis of coyote monogamy and the effects of losing a lifelong mate.
Records obtained by the group show the USDA’s Predator Research Facility in Millville captures wild coyotes, including pups taken from dens, breeds them, and holds them permanently in captivity for research that includes deliberately creating widows by killing one member of a bonded pair.
The NSF awarded Utah State University an initial $583,214 grant on December 23, 2024, with the project period beginning April 1, 2025. An additional $548,775 was added on September 18, 2025, bringing the total identified for the coyote monogamy and grief testing to at least $1,131,989.
The USDA approved the related grief protocol in December 2025, which remains active through March 2030 and authorizes the use of up to 78 captive coyotes.
Procedures listed in the protocol include vasectomies, forced restraint, blood draws, brain-targeting drug injections, behavioral testing, GPS and video monitoring, the deliberate killing of mates, monitoring of the surviving animals, and collection of brains after death.
White Coat Waste obtained the protocol and related photographs through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The Millville facility, part of the USDA’s National Wildlife Research Center and operated in conjunction with Utah State University, has maintained a colony of captive coyotes for more than five decades.
Some coyotes are bred on site, while others are wild-born pups dug from natural dens before they are old enough to leave.
Once inside the enclosures, the animals are never returned to the wild and remain in captivity until they die or are killed.
Earlier published work using the same colony adapted partner-preference tests originally developed for prairie voles to measure affiliative behavior between coyote pair-mates versus strangers.
Additional experiments at the facility have included placement in foothold traps while other coyotes watched, which was classified in the highest pain category because pain relief was withheld, sterilization studies, testing of experimental toxicants and poisoned baits that produced vomiting, seizures, and death, and various fear-response, social-learning, and trap-avoidance trials.
A New York Times article on the animal grief studies featured Sara Freeman and her work with the USDA colony, noting that researchers had examined brain samples from deceased coyotes, including widows, and observed changes in stress-related receptors in regions linked to smell, learning, and memory.
The piece described Freeman’s lab examining what she called “a brain widow” and framed the research as exploring whether animals experience something analogous to human grief after the loss of a long-term partner.
The Times reports:
In her airy, third-floor laboratory, Dr. Freeman is trying to understand how coyote couples forge these bonds — and what happens when they are broken.
“This is a widowed brain,” she said, pulling a few foil-wrapped packages from an ultracold freezer one morning in August. Each held a block of brain tissue, collected from a female coyote who had outlived her mate.
A student began shaving the frozen tissue into paper-thin slices, using the tip of a small paintbrush to nudge each translucent cross-section onto a glass slide. Later, the researchers would examine the samples, looking for neurological signs of “what we would call a grief state,” Dr. Freeman said.
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White Coat Waste’s coyote monogamy investigation is part of the organization’s new “Wildlife Waste” campaign exposing taxpayer-funded experimentation on wild animals, including on vipers and armadillos.
The organization is working to end cruel taxpayer-funded animal testing entirely, however, and switch to more modern methods.
“PETA has been telling its donors that the ‘lights are out’ on Harvard neurobiologist Margaret Livingstone’s cruel infant-monkey lab, but federal records say otherwise.”
📰 PETA APPEARS TO RUN COVER FOR BRUTAL MONKEY TORTURER AFTER OBAMA-APPOINTED JUDGE REVERSES TRUMP’S HARVARD FUNDING FREEZE
September 26, 2026
by Cassandra MacDonald, Gateway Pundit“PETA has been telling its donors that the ‘lights are out’ on Harvard neurobiologist Margaret Livingstone’s cruel infant-monkey lab, but federal records say otherwise.
A new notice of funding… came just sixteen months after PETA toasted ‘the end of Margaret Livingstone’s career as tormenter of baby monkeys.’
NIH RePORTER still lists Livingstone as the contact principal investigator on a National Eye Institute award at Harvard Medical School with an award notice dated September 11, 2026, fiscal year 2026 funding of $850,148; a budget period running September 1, 2026, through August 31, 2027; and a project end date of August 31, 2028.
Livingstone was also awarded a new grant on April 17, 2025, with fiscal year 2025 funding of $576,474; a project start date of May 1, 2025; a subsequent award notice dated June 1, 2026, for fiscal year 2026 funding of $576,201; and a project end date of April 30, 2029.
PETA’s May 27, 2025, release claimed a ‘massive victory’ and said funding for the baby-monkey experiments ‘has been terminated.’
A PETA news post updated May 28, 2025, said ‘the lights have finally gone out on Margaret Livingstone’s dark experiments on baby monkeys’ and that the work was on Harvard’s list of canceled federal grants.
PETA2 told younger readers the same week, ‘the lights are finally out’ and ‘NIH just pulled the plug.’
NIH itself posted on May 29, 2025, that it had ‘terminated funding at Harvard University for studies that included sewing the eyes of young monkeys shut.’
Then, a Boston judge gave the money back.
On September 3, 2025, U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs, an Obama appointee, granted Harvard summary judgment, vacated the administration’s freeze orders and termination letters, and barred the government from giving those letters any force.
The NIH termination letter dated May 6, 2025, was among the letters she set aside. The judgment vacated ‘all freezes and terminations of funding to Harvard made pursuant to the Freeze Orders and Termination Letters on or after April 14, 2025.’
The Daily Caller reported this week that taxpayer money is still moving through multiple Livingstone grants, including the new $850,000 award posted this month and a multi-year grant running through 2029.
PETA’s own description… includes infant macaques taken from their mothers, some raised with only a cloth surrogate, some fitted with vision-distorting goggles or strobe-like conditions for months, some with eyelids sewn shut, some implanted with electrode arrays, and many later killed and dissected….
Asked by The Gateway Pundit how a live $850,148 award notice squares with ‘lights out,’ PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo sounded either in denial or like she was covering for the program.
Guillermo claimed, ‘After years of campaigning to end Margaret Livingstone’s sickening atrocities, including ripping newborn monkeys from their mothers, forcing them to wear vision-distorting goggles, or subjecting them to hours of strobe lights, PETA verified in 2025 and again today that NIH has pulled this vile woman’s funding and her ability to continue this torture.’ …
When sent follow-up questions about how they explain the September 11 award notice, the open budget year, or Burroughs vacating the Harvard terminations, PETA did not respond.
PETA did not explain why RePORTER still names Livingstone as project leader on an active Eye Institute line.
PETA also did not respond to questions about how they ‘verified’ that information or where it came from.
The lights PETA said were out appear to still be glaring, at a cost of $1,426,349 to taxpayers.”
— White Coat Waste (@WhiteCoatWaste) September 28, 2026
In a statement provided to The Gateway Pundit, White Coat Waste founder Anthony Bellotti said:
“In 2011, I founded White Coat Waste to blow the lid off an inconvenient truth: the U.S. government is the world’s largest funder of animal experimentation. Now, we’re exposing another one: taxpayers are funding experiments on wild animals, too.
An exclusive new White Coat Waste investigation has uncovered the receipts for more than $1.1 million in National Science Foundation spending on ‘coyote monogamy’ experiments — along with never-before-seen photographic evidence from a five-decade-old USDA lab that captures wild coyotes and abuses them for no good reason at all.
Our tax dollars are paying to rip apart bonded pairs, deliberately widow coyotes by killing their mates, then study the survivors’ grief. In other words, the government is causing coyote grief — just to study coyote grief.
‘Coyote monogamy’ is the worst kind of Wildlife Waste. The solution is simple: Stop the Money. Stop the Madness!”
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