{"id":111763,"date":"2018-05-21T12:36:49","date_gmt":"2018-05-21T11:36:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=111763"},"modified":"2018-05-21T12:42:11","modified_gmt":"2018-05-21T11:42:11","slug":"bred-to-suffer-inside-the-barbaric-u-s-industry-of-dog-experimentation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/05\/bred-to-suffer-inside-the-barbaric-u-s-industry-of-dog-experimentation\/","title":{"rendered":"Bred to Suffer: Inside the Barbaric U.S. Industry of Dog Experimentation"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article includes graphic images that some readers may find disturbing.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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A \u201cresearch dog\u201d in its cage at Ridglan Farms Inc. Photo: DxE<\/p><\/div>\n

17 May 2018 – <\/em>There is a largely hidden, poorly regulated, and highly profitable industry in the United States that has a gruesome function: breeding dogs for the sole purpose of often torturous experimentation, after which the dogs are killed because they are no longer of use.<\/p>\n

Americans frequently express horror<\/a> at festivals in countries such as China and South Korea where dogs are killed, cooked, and eaten. Mainstream media outlets in the U.S. routinely report<\/a>, with a\u00a0tone of disgust<\/a>, on the use of dogs in those countries for food consumption.<\/p>\n

But in the\u00a0U.S. itself, corporations and academic institutions exploit dogs (as well as cats and rabbits) for excruciating experiments that are completely trivial, even useless, and are just as abusive as the practices in Asia that have produced so much moral indignation in the West. These dogs are frequently bred into life for the sole purpose of being laboratory objects, and spend their entire, often short, existence locked in a small cage, subjected to procedures that impose extreme pain and suffering.<\/p>\n

httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=iqHKLVP4tPQ<\/p>\n

The horrors of the dog experimentation industry\u00a0are on vivid display at Ridglan Farms Inc., a company that provides beagles to research facilities.<\/p>\n

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture\u2019s aptly named the\u00a0Animal Usage report<\/a>, 60,979 dogs were used in the U.S. for experimentation in 2016 alone. The reported number of all animals used for experimentation, whose reporting was required, was 820,812. Often, the experimentation has nothing to do with medical research, but rather trivial commercial interests, and in almost all cases, dogs provide little to no unique scientific value. This chart, compiled by\u00a0Speaking\u00a0of Research<\/a>\u00a0using USDA data, reflects the total numbers of animals used for experimentation in 2016 \u2014 an increase of 6.9 percent as compared to the prior year:<\/p>\n

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Dogs bred into life for use\u00a0or sale as experimentation\u00a0objects have all the same emotional complexities, sensations of suffering and deprivation, and inbred need\u00a0for human companionship as household dogs which are loved as pets and members of the family. Yet the legalized cruelty and torture to which man\u2019s best friend is subjected for profit in the U.S. is virtually limitless.<\/p>\n

In fact, the majority of dogs bred and sold for experimentation are beagles<\/a>, which are considered ideal because of their docile, human-trusting personality. In other words, the very traits that have made them such loving and loyal companions to humans are the ones that humans exploit\u00a0to best manipulate them in labs.<\/p>\n

Even when legal standards are adhered to \u2014 and they often are not \u2014 the\u00a0permitted abuse to which these dogs are subjected is horrifying. They are often purposely starved or put into a state of severe thirst to induce behavior they would otherwise not engage in. They are frequently bred deliberately to have crippling, excruciating diseases, or sometimes are brought into life just to have have their organs, eyes, and other body parts<\/a> removed and studied as puppies, and then quickly killed.<\/p>\n

They are force-fed laundry detergents, pesticides, and industrial chemicals to the point of continuous vomiting and death. They are injected with lethal pathogens such as salmonella or rabies. They have artificial sweetener injected into their veins that causes\u00a0the dogs\u2019 testicles to shrink before they\u00a0are\u00a0killed and exsanguinated. Holes are drilled into their skulls so that viruses can be injected into their brains. And all of that is perfectly legal.<\/p>\n

The horrors of the dog experimentation industry\u00a0are on vivid display at Ridglan Farms Inc., one of the three largest\u00a0firms in the U.S. that provides beagles to research facilities. Located in Dane County, Wisconsin \u2014 on a hill west of Madison \u2014 the corporation, according to\u00a0Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE, investigators, provides dogs to research facilities that include the University of Wisconsin, the University of Minnesota, and various colleges within the University of California system.<\/p>\n

Last spring, activists with DxE entered a door that was ajar at the Ridglan facility in order to investigate conditions inside, document what they saw, and rescue a sampling of dogs in particular distress. What they found horrified even these hardened activists, who have seen years worth of severe animal abuse.\u00a0DxE activists spent a year investigating the facility and the industry its serves, and are releasing their footage and accompanying report<\/a> for the first time today.<\/p>\n

One of the DxE investigators, Wayne Hsiung, told The Intercept, \u201cAs you approach the facility, the smell is overwhelming \u2014 exactly the same smell from a dog meat slaughterhouse in China.\u201d The first thing the investigators saw upon entering \u2014 as demonstrated by the photo at the top of this article \u2014 was\u00a0that \u201cthe dogs are housed in huge industrial sheds with massive ventilation fans, very similar to the sheds used in factory farms.\u201d Hsiung, a former lawyer, added in an email:<\/p>\n

Thousands of dogs are held in cages, usually 1-2 to a cage and stacked on top of one another, that are about twice the length of the dog\u2019s body. We found no facilities for the dogs to step outside or exercise.\u00a0The dogs sit on their own feces and urine, unable to escape their own waste. Dogs are routinely so desperate to escape that they slam themselves against the cage walls, desperately stretch their paws through the bars, and sometimes chew on the cages.\u00a0The screams of the dogs in the facility are so loud that we were forced to yell at one another to communicate, even when we were only a foot away from one another.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In response to multiple requests from The Intercept that included detailed questions about what this story would include, a Ridglan spokesperson\u00a0said the company would decline to comment.<\/p>\n

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Cages of \u201cresearch dogs\u201d stacked on top of each other at Ridglan Farms Inc. Photo: DxE<\/p><\/div>\n

Dog experimentation is pervasive<\/strong><\/p>\n

The number of\u00a0dogs used for experimentation in the U.S. has generally declined some over the past several decades \u2014 though it rose again last year \u2014 but still remains remarkably high. The most common animals used for testing \u2014 mice, fish, and birds \u2014 are not covered by any federal regulations or reporting requirements, and thus no precise numbers are known, but estimates\u00a0vary from 20 million to as many as 100 million.<\/p>\n

The primary law governing treatment of animal experimentation is the\u00a0Animal Welfare Act<\/a>, or AWA, which was first enacted in 1966 under the name Laboratory Animal Welfare Act. Under all federal law, all forms of experimentation on animals \u2014 including on dogs \u2014 is legally permissible, even though superior research alternatives (such as stem cell research) are increasingly available. A\u00a0small handful of states have banned product testing on animals\u00a0if alternatives are available.<\/p>\n

While the AWA permits all animal experimentation, it requires minimal standards of\u00a0humane treatment for dogs that are bred and sold for experimentation. But even when these rules are complied with, the conditions in which \u201cresearch dogs\u201d\u00a0are routinely kept are nothing short of barbaric.<\/p>\n

For instance, regulations merely require<\/a> that the dogs\u2019 cage be six inches taller than their height and six inches longer than their body length.\u00a0Doubling that size eliminates the requirement<\/a> to allow the dogs out of their cage at all for exercise.<\/p>\n

The cruelty even of\u00a0treatment that complies with legal standards is illustrated by a handbook from one of the field\u2019s most authoritative researchers. The Laboratory Animal Medicine and Science training program series, developed by the American College of Laboratory Animal Medicine, the handbook is designed to create industry norms. Its author is Jerald Silverman<\/a>,\u00a0a leading authority figure in the animal research industry.<\/p>\n

The handbook describes the proper methods for putting \u201cear tattoos\u201d on the dogs for identification and tracking purposes. The first picture below is of a \u201cresearch dog\u201d kept in a cage that is twice the size required by federal regulations, which means, as Silverman notes, that the exercise requirements for the dog are eliminated. The two images below describe the \u201chumane\u201d way for treating research dogs, and the third relates to tattoos:<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>That\u00a0means that tens of thousands of dogs are barely able to move. They are fully isolated, with their metal cages stacked on top of one another. Many \u201cresearch dogs\u201d never see the sunlight, go outside, or exercise, spending their entire lives locked in a cage.<\/p>\n

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\u201cResearch dogs\u201d in cages at Ridglan Farms Inc. Photo: DxE<\/p><\/div>\n

Most dogs used in research are purchased from so-called Class A breeders, which are licensed specifically to breed and raise \u201cresearch dogs.\u201d (\u201cClass B\u201d dealers are ones who collect or buy animals, rather than breed them themselves.) Among the services they offer is \u201cdevocalization,\u201d which the advocacy group NAVS describes<\/a> as \u201ca surgical procedure which makes it physically impossible for the dog to bark.\u201d The procedure costs $20 to $47 per dog, according to NAVS, and is \u201cperformed so that barking dogs do not disturb lab technicians.\u201d The\u00a0Humane Society Veterinary Medical Association details<\/a> the significant pain and risks from such procedures.<\/p>\n

A new group devoted to stopping taxpayer-funded animal research, White Coat Waste Project<\/a>, created some national news<\/a> when they exposed horrific practices inside Veterans Affairs facilities earlier this year. \u201cWe\u2019re talking about tests like taking six-month-old puppies \u2013 putting them on treadmills \u2013 forcing them to run. Exhausted dogs, inducing heart attacks, sloppy and botched surgeries, restraint devices, drilling holes in their skulls, destroying their brains and charging taxpayers for it,\u201d one of the group\u2019s founders reported.<\/p>\n

Worst of all is that dogs and other mammals provide almost no medical value in experiments because of their physiology. Lawrence Hansen, a professor of neuroscience and pathology at the University of California-San Diego School of Medicine, once engaged in experimentation on\u00a0dogs and wrote how ashamed he was of this work in a\u00a02016 op-ed<\/a>\u00a0in the San Diego Union-Tribune:<\/p>\n

From a scientific perspective, the problem is that dogs, monkeys and mice are not simplified versions of humans. This is why the NIH reports that 95 percent of drugs that pass animal tests \u2014 often including beagles \u2014 fail in humans because they don\u2019t work or are dangerous. \u2026 In my specialty, Alzheimer\u2019s disease, the drug failure rate is actually 99.6 percent, and the use of animals has recently been referred to as \u201ca cliff over which people push bales of money.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One of the most common experimental techniques used\u00a0on dogs is known as \u201coral gavage,\u201d used\u00a0to force animals to ingest substances they otherwise would refuse. The scientific literature, such as this 2015 study<\/a> from the\u00a0Journal of Pharmacological and Toxicological Methods, defines it as \u201ca technique for delivering a substance directly into the stomach and is frequently used to administer test compounds in research and toxicity testing.\u201d<\/p>\n

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This is the same hideous technique that is used to make foie gras<\/a>, by force-feeding a bird, duck, or goose to the point that its liver enlarges to such massive proportions that the animal suffers excruciating pain before death. So cruel is the procedure that many cities around the world \u2014 from San Francisco<\/a> to S\u00e3o Paulo<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 have banned the sale of foie gras altogether. But the technique continues to be permitted, and widely used, on dogs in laboratories across the U.S.<\/p>\n

As loose and permissive as\u00a0this legal framework is, these standards are often flagrantly\u00a0ignored by many dog breeding and experimentation corporations \u2014 with little consequence. Dogs are often mangled, tortured, and killed through sadistic abuse, reckless experimentation, or just sheer negligence.<\/p>\n

Beagles Preferred\u00a0for Experiments<\/strong><\/p>\n

The dog breed which corporate breeders and research labs prefer is the beagle. In a dark and twisted irony, what makes them such beloved and kind animals, and particularly well suited for households with small children, is precisely what dooms them to an existence of suffering as objects of experimentation. The National Institutes of Health\u2019s poorly named Office of Research Integrity\u00a0states the blunt truth<\/a>: \u201cMost of the dogs used in research are beagles due to their convenient size and docile nature.\u201d<\/p>\n

The\u00a0neuroscience professor who once experimented on dogs and now regrets it, Hansen, wrote in his op-ed<\/a>,\u00a0\u201cOf all the animals used in research, subjecting dogs to invasive experiments is especially condemnable because humans have selectively bred dogs to unconditionally love the very people who sometimes visit abuses upon them.\u201d That is especially true of beagles, because of how kind, loving, and thus malleable they are.<\/p>\n

About\u00a0such experimentation, Hansen wrote, \u201cAfter three decades, I\u2019m still ashamed to say I was once convinced to participate in this betrayal.\u201d And he describes how his training in experimenting on and then killing dogs went back to medical school:<\/p>\n

Back in medical school, I was instructed to cut apart and kill dogs \u2014 a Golden Retriever and a black Lab \u2014 for physiology demonstrations and surgical practice. In the latter case, we were made to perform weekly surgeries on the same dogs until the end of the lesson and until, frankly, the dogs couldn\u2019t take any more of the mutilations and we put them out of their misery. I did it, qualms of conscience notwithstanding, because I was told it was \u201cnecessary.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Increasingly, shelter mutts are also often used, as\u00a0People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals found as part of an investigation<\/a>\u00a0it conducted: \u201cPETA\u2019s undercover investigation inside the laboratories of the University of Utah revealed that the school was purchasing homeless dogs and cats from local shelters for use in invasive, painful, and often deadly experiments.\u201d But in the world of corporate breeders, beagles remain the object of choice.\u00a0Scientific literature, for decades, has bluntly discussed the attributes of beagles that make them ideal for experimentation:<\/p>\n

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Jeremy Beckham, a research associate with PETA\u2019s Laboratory Investigations Department, wrote a definitive history of how beagles became, during the Cold War, the breed of choice to treat as objects for experimentation, with virtually no limits on the suffering and torture to which they were subjected.<\/p>\n

In 1952, he wrote, \u201cExperimenters at the University of Utah Radiobiology Laboratory injected a beagle known only as \u2018T0P5\u2032 with a radioactive and highly toxic isotope of plutonium.\u00a0The dose that was given to T0P5 \u2013 more than 3 microcuries per kilogram \u2013 was 1,620 times the recommended maximum amount for human exposure.\u201d Twenty-four hours later, ToP5, only 33 months old, was killed.<\/p>\n

That began a huge spate of experimentation with and killing of beagles. Over the next several decades, the U.S. government spent $200 million \u2014 a large sum for those years \u2014 on injecting dogs with radiation. As Beckham noted, \u201cBetween the years of 1952 and 1983, federally funded radiation research killed more than 7,000 beagles in laboratories located in six locations throughout the United States: University of Utah, University of California-Davis, Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, the Pacific Northwest Laboratory in Washington state, the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute in New Mexico, and Colorado State University.\u201d<\/p>\n

These gruesome experiments, like most dog experimentation today, produced almost no scientific value. As Beckham documents, \u201cEpidemiological and clinical studies during this same timeframe provided us with much more meaningful data about the dangers of ionizing radiation.\u201d But it started the trend of\u00a0breeding beagles into life in order to use them for all forms of experimentation, and then dispense with them when done.<\/p>\n

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April 1956 article in Mechanix Illustrated on the University of Utah\u2019s beagle experimentation program.<\/p><\/div>\n

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A 1962 academic paper entitled \u201cAdult Beagles. Radiation Research\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

Even as dogs have become beloved pets in the U.S., treated as members of the family, with harsh punishments for those who abuse them, the behavior of corporate and academic entities that subject dogs to gruesome experimentations has barely changed. It\u2019s a strange hypocrisy: Individuals may not abuse these animals, but corporations can.<\/p>\n

One stirring video excerpt, provided to The Intercept by Beckham from a PETA investigation into Liberty Research Inc.<\/a>, shows how dogs, and cats, are treated as inanimate laboratory objects who, once their usefulness runs arounds, have their lives extinguished with the casualness of how one tosses a used paper towel into a trash can:<\/p>\n

httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=zyaWEMrwclQ&t=2s<\/p>\n

That gratuitous and indescribably cruel experimentation on beagles\u00a0is as barbaric as ever is illustrated by this opening paragraph from Craig Masilow\u2019s 2015 expos\u00e9<\/a> in the Houston Press:<\/p>\n

The purpose-bred laboratory beagle\u00a0is a remarkably versatile animal. It can be used to ingest a toxic compound until it dies and to ascertain human safety guidelines for pesticides. Its heart, brain and prostate are easily accessible for cancer studies. It is bred to be docile and obedient, and, if necessary, it can be purchased\u00a0sans\u00a0working vocal cords. For around $700, you get a 33-pound specimen that needs no more than 8 square feet of kennel space, per federal law.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The group Rescue Freedom Project is devoted to rescuing beagles and other dogs<\/a> from research labs. This video excerpt shows the first dog they ever rescued \u2014 a beagle who had been \u201cdevocalized\u201d \u2014 as she steps on grass for the first time in her life, in 2010, after having spent her life being experimented on. The trauma is palpable, as one would expect:<\/p>\n