Amid the recent cuts to research funding, animal experimenters are very publicly complaining that if their funding is cut, they will have to kill the animals in their laboratories. Here is what they are not telling you: They were going to kill these animals anyway.

There are about 100 million animals caged in U.S. laboratories right now. That number includes cats, dogs, mice, rats, monkeys of all types, guinea pigs, horses and pigs. Every one of these animals is marked for death upon arrival at a facility. If they end up in a laboratory, they will die, almost without exception.

The only difference is that typically, these animals are killed after experimenters have carved into their skulls, injected them with chemicals, inflicted unimaginable pain and fear on them, damaged their brains, surgically mutilated them, kept them on the brink of dehydration or nearly starved them, kept them in solitary confinement inside cages barely big enough to hold them or subjected them to any number or combination of such workaday horrors.

Don’t be fooled by the phony tears of animal experimenters who are suddenly pretending to care about the animals they torment. These experimenters want to save their funding, not animals.

Take, for example, Harvard University experimenter Sarah Fortune, who sickens monkeys with tuberculosis before she kills them. Recently, she claimed that proposed federal funding cuts would force the mass killing of animals in her experiments. It was a convenient argument, and she counted on the public knowing no better.

But Fortune’s argument was deliberately misleading. She was going to kill those monkeys anyway, once she was done tormenting them. The lack of federal funding or its presence would never change the fact that those monkeys were going to die.

What Fortune and other animal experimenters also don’t want you to know is that their studies on animals fail to produce cures and treatments for humans. The most recent independent study shows that a staggering 90% of basic research, most of which involves animals, never leads to treatments for humans.

Moreover, 95% of all new drugs that test safe and effective in animals fail in human clinical trials, most because they don’t work or are dangerous. Half of all the few drugs that make it to market are later withdrawn due to adverse effects. The failure rate of new drugs in specific disease research areas is even worse: 100% of HIV vaccines, drugs for stroke and sepsis treatments have failed, as have 96.6% of treatments for cancer and 99.6% of all Alzheimer’s disease treatments.

Animal experimentation steals time and money away from more productive and compassionate lines of scientific inquiry. Superior, human-relevant methods are available, such as advanced computer modeling, AI, organ-on-a-chip technology, in vitro studies and noninvasive research with human volunteers, among many others.

Fortune and the other animal experimenters currently whining to the media don’t care about the animals in their laboratories. If they did, they wouldn’t torment them in pointless experiments in the first place.

This made-up “crisis,” manufactured by experimenters on the government grant gravy train, hides an opportunity. With looming federal funding cuts and the National Institutes of Health’s recent announcement that it will prioritize human-relevant research and move away from animal use, now is the perfect time to close all cruel animal laboratories forever.

This is a chance to relegate the inferior and wasteful animal experimentation paradigm to the dustbin of history and channel money into superior, animal-free methods of research.

This was written by Dr. Katherine Roe, a former NIH clinical researcher and chief scientist with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).