MADISON, Wis. – A University of Wisconsin laboratory is discontinuing the use of live cats in experiments.

The experiments – which PETA deemed cruel – are retiring, along with chief researcher Tom Yin.

MORE NEWS: Know These Before Moving From Cyprus To The UK

“In 2009 PETA sought information on Yin’s experiments through an open records request, which led to investigations by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Institute of Health,” WKZO reports.

While the lab was cleared in those investigations, “the agriculture department fined the university $35,000 last year for seven separate violations of the Animal Welfare Act, citing instances of animal negligence,” according to the news station.

Four of Yin’s feline pincushions were adopted into homes and a fifth was euthanized.

PETA claimed victory with the discontinuation of the research program.

But the university responded, “The important research conducted by Dr. Yin and his colleagues was in no way affected or curtailed due to activity by animal rights organizations and any such claims are patently false,” according to WKZO.

“PETA will not quit. They have made four open records requests, and each is just a different time window with different cats they’re looking at,” Yin said of the group’s campaign.

MORE NEWS: How to prepare for face-to-face classes

“Underpinning this whole story is this tremendous pressure that PETA put on the regulatory agencies and UW-Madison,” Eric Sandgren, director of UW-Madison’s Research Animal Resource Center, tells the Isthmus.

Sandgren claims PETA “besmirched” the university’s reputation and “did so in a way that had no basis of fact.”

“We didn’t have access to all the charges against us, and we spent hundreds of hours working with the people that came in from the outside to prove to them we had done things correctly,” he adds.

UW-Madison is one of the most progressive in the country, yet the claims leveled by PETA are downright barbaric.

“The UW cat experiment is one of the most invasive experiments happening anywhere in the country,” PETA’s Jeremy Beckham tells the paper.

“The cats in the lab are sometimes intentionally deafened. They implant electrical devices in their inner ear, in their brain, stitch a coil to their eye. Their bodies are being mutilated in a number of different ways. Many of the cats are basically wasting away. They’re getting sick, they’re having to be euthanized. It’s a real travesty.”