Former Beatle Paul McCartney has hit out at Texas university for allegedly “using dogs for experiments” in an impassioned open letter.

McCartney is responding to footage released by PETA which supposedly shows the university performing muscular dystrophy experiments on dogs.

In a letter written to Texas A&M University President Michael K. Young, McCartney has urged him to stop the experiment and described the footage as “heartbreaking” before details his love for the animal.

“The video footage of golden retrievers in your university’s dog laboratory is heartbreaking,” he wrote in a letter yesterday. “I have had dogs since I was a boy and loved them all dearly, including Martha, who was my companion for about 15 years and about whom I wrote the song ‘Martha My Dear’.”

McCartney continued: “Please do the right thing by ending the suffering of dogs in TAMU’s muscular dystrophy laboratory and switching to modern research methods instead.”

McCartney is a longterm animal rights and has previously teamed up with PETA on numerous different projects in the past.

More recently McCartney criticised the UK government after his Liverpool art school had its funding slashed.

Liverpool’s Institute of Performing Arts, which was co-founded by the former Beatle, has reportedly had £16 million cut from its funding. McCartney said a “series of errors, made in 2016, cost the institute in potential funding and a further £160,000 for the initial steps of a judicial review.”

Furious about the news, McCartney added: “I helped to bring LIPA into life during very difficult times for Liverpool. It is now a highly respected institution all over the world.”

He added: “Our funding was recently affected by what to me, and the heads of every university in Liverpool, was a flawed process. LIPA is my passion and part of my legacy. It would not be fair to allow injustice to affect its future. I sincerely hope the Government will correct this error and help us to continue our work successfully into the future.”