It is commonly said that researchers favor using beagles in lab experiments because they are a gentle and compliant breed.
Nearly 4,000 beagles were rescued in July 2022 from the Envigo breeding facility in Cumberland, Virginia. These dogs were to be sold to laboratories for experimentation, but the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Envigo RMS, the facility’s owner, alleging that the company was failing to provide the dogs with humane care as required by the Animal Welfare Act.
“Government inspectors found that beagles there were being killed instead of receiving veterinary treatment for easily treated conditions; nursing mother beagles were denied food; the food that they did receive contained maggots, mold and feces; and over an eight-week period, 25 beagle puppies died from cold exposure,” Kitty Block, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, wrote in her blog at the time.
The dogs were removed and adopted out to homes, including at least 50 that went to the Adams County Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and were adopted by dog lovers in the state.
This week many of those dogs were at the Pennsylvania Capitol in Harrisburg to help Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano introduce legislation preventing institutions from using state funds to support the most painful classification of experimentation on dogs and cats as defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
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More than 3,000 dogs and more than 1,000 cats are currently subjected to testing at universities and labs across Pennsylvania, according to Mastriano.
The bill would also increase transparency by requiring institutions that receive state funding for dog and cat tests to disclose the amount of state funding it received, the amount of federal and private funding it received, and to clearly indicate in all public communications that “funding for these experiments was provided with Pennsylvania taxpayer dollars.” It also would require the Pennsylvania Department of the Treasury to release an annual report about animal research directly or indirectly funded with state dollars.
It also requires institutions receiving state funding to make healthy dogs and cats used in experimentation available for adoption when they’re no longer needed for testing.
“Dogs have their hearts, lungs, or kidneys deliberately damaged or removed to study how experimental substances might affect human organ function,” Mastriano said in a press conference. “Cats have their spinal cords damaged and are forced to run on treadmills to study how nerve activity might affect human limb movement. The vocal cords of dogs and cats are removed so they can’t make noise when they are in pain.”
The bill would also prohibit the use of public funds to surgically devocalize dogs or cats in laboratories.
“This is insanity to me, being 2023, why we still do this. It just boggles my mind,” Mastriano said. “We subject our beloved dogs and cats to painful testing when alternatives may be found. Replacing animal tests does not mean putting human patients at risk.”
He said it is time to find a better way to do testing and make medical progress without using animals.
Several new beagle owners spoke about their experience with their rescued dogs.
Among them was Sara Nicholas, who talked about her dog, Archie, who has been in the family for nine weeks.
Archie has chomped through her TV remote, chewed up her computer mouse, and steals books from an upstairs bookshelf, then races down the stairs and prances around the yard with books in mouth.
“He leaps in the air to try to catch butterflies, birds, and squirrels. He lunges at rabbits, which his instincts tell him he was born to do. In other words, Archie is all dog,” Nicholas said. “He is a joy and a constant pain in the neck. He’s like a toddler and I suspect his first six months within the facility has left him with arrested development.”
Above all, Archie is a family pet, not a lab animal, Nicholas said, and she is saddened to think of him spending the rest of his life in a cage, subjected to testing.
“No dog or cat or frankly any other animal should suffer this way,” she said.
Nicholas hopes that in the future no animal will face such a grim and joyless existence.
