For reasons completely unknown to me, a few weeks ago I developed a very strong desire to research books and articles at the intersection of animal welfare, bitcoin, and politics, but unfortunately I came up with a big fat nada. Oh, I did find a few Facebook posts here and there wondering about whether crypto can help animal rights, and I found a few announcements of animal rights groups accepting cryptocurrency donations, but I didn't really find anything with the gravitas worthy of this endeavor. (For some reason, I felt quite deeply that the task was very grandiose, but I don't know why I felt that way.)

But since I couldn't find anything someone else had written, why not write my own article, I thought? Surely, an endeavor of this importance was worth a few hours of my time?

So, I dove headlong into my quest---researching how bitcoin can be a tool for improving animal welfare, and I came to the following conclusion: while animal experimentation is unlikely to completely end under a Bitcoin standard, there will probably be less of it, and especially less of it used in projects that have low potential for social value.

Here is my reasoning.

The Scale of Animal ResearchThe Scale of Animal Research

Official USDA statistics report that each year, about 775,000 animals (excluding rats, mice, birds, fish, and cold-blooded animals) are used for research in the United States. The reason that rats, mice, birds, etc. are not included in those statistics is because they are not covered by the Animal Welfare Act (AWA), and therefore experiments using them do not need to be reported at all. Thus, the true number of animals used in research is actually much higher. Estimates for the total number of animals used for research in the US range from about 25 million to over 100 million. Global estimates are even higher, with one study putting the number used globally at nearly 200 million.

In the US, 240,000 AWA-covered animals are used each year in experiments that result in pain, including over 12,000 dogs and over 3,000 cats. And in 56,000 of those experiments, no attempt was made to minimize the pain. These numbers include only the species covered by the AWA, and thus the total number of animals of all species experiencing pain as the result of scientific experimentation is much higher. And presumably, if we extrapolate to the whole world, where the standards for ethical treatment of animals are much laxer, the numbers are even higher.

Scandalous ExamplesScandalous Examples

Harvard Infant Monkey ExperimentsHarvard Infant Monkey Experiments

In 2025, under public pressure, Harvard University shut down the lab of Dr. Margaret Livingstone for animal welfare violations. The lab was found to have "tore baby monkeys away from their mothers and deprived them of normal visual input to observe the harmful effects on their developing brains", "forced infant monkeys to wear goggles that simulated disorienting strobe lights for the first 18 months of their lives", and "sewn other monkeys' eyes shut, and after years of torment, killed and dissected many of the animals."

Scientific Beagle Breeding AbuseScientific Beagle Breeding Abuse

In 2022, Envigo, a breeder of research dogs(!) in Virginia, was shut down after investigators discovered severe violations of the AWA. An undercover investigation discovered "over 360 puppies lying dead among their littermates", "staff depriving nursing mothers of food", "unqualified workers cutting puppies out of sedated dogs' abdomens before euthanizing the mothers", and "dogs being denied veterinary care and dying after falling into a drain".

NIAID Funded Abuse of DogsNIAID Funded Abuse of Dogs

In 2021, controversy erupted when a FOIA request found that the NIAID had been funding multiple drug tests involving puppies, including tests that "involved injecting and force-feeding the puppies an experimental drug for several weeks, before killing and dissecting them." Of particular concern was a line item discovered for a "cordectomy", which is a medical procedure for "slitting a dog's vocal cords in order to prevent them from barking, howling, or crying." One of the projects, which was later fact-checked to be not funded by NIAID, allegedly involved "locking beagles' heads in mesh cages filled with hundreds of infected sand flies." This project led to the following widely circulated image:

Although that particular study was later discovered to not have been funded by NIAID, the other mentioned studies were, and the controversy eventually led to the NIH's last remaining beagle testing lab to be shut down in 2025.

The Economic ArgumentThe Economic Argument

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not some bleeding heart animal rights activist. I'm not signing up for PETA any time soon.

But regardless of your ethical position on animal rights, I think most people can agree: scientific experimentation on animals without proportional benefit is of no merit, and should thus be discouraged.

And so that's the angle I'm coming at it from. By decreasing the availability of government funding for animal studies, we reduce the number of studies for which the benefits are not commensurate with the ethical cost of using animals in experimentation.

Now, you might be wondering: why are privately undertaken studies more likely to have benefits commensurate with the ethical cost of using animals in experimentation? The first step is to acknowledge that there is a cost. Even if the company itself does not care, reputational harm is enough for the business to consider the ethical cost of mistreating animals. A private business must carefully balance the potential value of a project with the costs to produce it. If a particular research project is likely to be of low value, a private business would not be willing to risk reputational damage in pursuit of that project.

This accountability is not present in government funded research. The ability to acquire funding for a government-funded project has less to do with the potential market value of the project and more to do with who the researcher knows within the granting agency, or how much the research is aligned with the ideological aims of the bureaucracy. This results in a total disconnect between the potential social value of a project and its ethical implications. This is how we get taxpayer-funded research projects spending millions of dollars to create transgender lab rats.

You might counter that the businesses who were shut down for abusing puppies were private businesses. But that argument misses the fact that their primary customers were most likely government funded research labs. I say "most likely" because there are no statistics about what fraction of animal research is done using public vs. private funds. But nevertheless, we know that a significant fraction (about 47%) of NIH funded research involves animal experimentation. These labs were thus, assuredly, part of the customer base that purchased animals from these abusive breeders, and they are the customers least likely to be worried about reputational damage and least likely to have their incentives aligned towards the potential value of the project.

So how does Bitcoin enter into the picture? Under a Bitcoin standard, governments will be much more tightly constrained in how they can spend their money. Because governments will not be able to print money out of thin air, and because they won't be able to as easily confiscate money from their citizens, even the government will have to be more careful about how it spends its money. In other words, animal research under a Bitcoin standard will only be undertaken for the highest valued projects, because low-valued projects simply wouldn't get funded.

Of course, you may see that as a bit of a utopian dream: can governments really be trusted to make better decisions if only the money were better? I agree that this is perhaps a bit too utopian. As Josh Hendrickson has pointed out, hard money standards have not prevented governments from undertaking stupid actions in the past.

Nevertheless, the symptoms of a fiat driven society are plain as day to us right now. Even if Bitcoin does not result in some perfect utopia, as it's unlikely to do, it will still be a step in the right direction---including for animal welfare.