Every October, Domestic Violence Awareness Month reminds Americans of a grim reality: Millions of people live with abuse at the hands of an intimate partner.

With such an urgent need to help survivors, it’s fair to ask why the U.S. military is wasting more than $5 million on an experiment in Canada that includes strangulation-like procedures and head impacts on mice.

The facts are as stark as they are straightforward.

The U.S. Department of War is funding University of British Columbia experimenter Cheryl Wellington to compress blood vessels in the necks of mice and restrict their airways in what she calls a “nonfatal strangulation” model of intimate partner violence–related brain injury.

Wellington also subjects mice to head impact procedures, in which a n air-powered metal piston rapidly strikes an animal’s skull, whipping the head backward, causing it to rotate and inflicting injuries.

Domestic violence is not a single injury, event or diagnosis. It’s a complex human experience shaped by coercion, psychological trauma, isolation, repeated abuse and social context. Attempting to reduce it to mechanically induced injury in mice also overlooks fundamental physiological differences between mice and humans, raising serious questions about how directly the results can inform care for survivors.

That disconnect is especially troubling given the scale of domestic violence in the United States. Current data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that more than one in three women and more than one in six men have experienced sexual violence, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetimes.

Those numbers represent real people who need effective diagnosis, treatment, protection and justice. Public funding should prioritize research that is grounded in the realities of human abuse and capable of producing evidence that clinicians and courts can use.

Wellington’s own human-subject research points to a better approach. In a separate study, her team used blood samples from 177 people to develop a test intended to detect brain injuries in survivors of intimate partner violence.

That work illustrates the real-world potential of human-relevant research: improving access to appropriate healthcare and documenting brain changes that may help support survivors in court. Unlike her experiments on mice, Wellington’s human-subject research demonstrates the better path: sound, human-relevant science with the potential to directly improve care and help victims in their healing journey.

The U.S. Department of War should end funding for this crude animal experiment and invest instead in research and services that directly benefit survivors. Domestic violence is a serious human issue, and strangling animals in a laboratory is not the answer.

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Sydney Rader, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, works in PETA’s Laboratory Investigations Department, 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; www.PETA.org.

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