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Virginia Sens. William M. Stanley Jr., R-Franklin County, and Glen H. Sturtevant Jr., R-Richmond, have introduced a bill to prohibit the use of state funds to pay for experiments on dogs and cats that are considered painful.

The bill comes after the senators also wrote to Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s office in October, asking for details on state grants that pay for experiments on dogs that are classified as painful by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“There’s a big difference between lab rats and Labrador retrievers,” Sturtevant said.

Washington-based watchdog group White Coat Waste Project launched a campaign to bring to light so-called maximum pain experiments at the McGuire Veterans Affairs Medical Center in South Richmond.

The medical center has done experiments on dogs to study cardiac health in humans that were classified under the USDA’s system as category E, which involves subjecting the animals to potentially painful or stressful conditions without any pain relief involved.

Learning of these experiments, Sturtevant said, was disturbing in and of itself, but what was even more concerning was finding out that nearly $100,000 in state taxpayer money — through state grants — was used to support those experiments.