Abusing Beagles and Calling It Science
Animal experiments produce medical breakthroughs along with unmeasured agony. A new book scrutinizes the industry as animal-rights politics shift.
My review of Melanie D.G. Kaplan’s Lab Dog: A Beagle and His Human Investigate the Surprising World of Animal Research for the Washington Independent Review of Books
The Trump administration promises to reduce the torture of dogs, rabbits, monkeys and mice in drug research as part of its “Make America Healthy Again” program.
Federal officials talk about “a paradigm shift” of replacing animal tests with computer simulations and lab-grown organs. Fox News is in favor. White Coat Waste Project, a Republican-linked animal-rights group, says the Trump people aren’t moving fast enough.
Changes favored by progressives often need conservative support before they become the rules of society. The animal-welfare movement of Albert Schweitzer and Jane Goodall has now signed up right-wing flamer Laura Loomer.
To understand how we got here, meet Hammy, freed from beagle prison and assigned to the lab beat along with journalist Melanie D. G. Kaplan.
They drive around the country visiting breeding factories, universities and rescue ranches. They interview scientists, business people, activists, and politicians. They politely query others making a living off of animal testing who never reply.
The project includes investigating the life of Hammy, who is sweet, anxious, and scared of cats, before Kaplan adopted him. Who bred him? What lab funded by the FDA or NIH bought him? What did they do to him?
Kaplan is honorably fair in a genre not known for balance, appropriately invoking Jeremy Bentham and the notion that a certain amount of harm can lead to immeasurable good.
Dog experiments were essential to the discovery of insulin. Manipulative brain surgery on monkeys and cats advanced neuroscience. Nasty procedures on dogs and pigs led to heart-disease treatments in people.
She correctly notes that animal-welfare advocates sometimes seem more interested in publicity and fundraising than helping animals.
Labs hesitate to offer post-test beagles for adoption instead of euthanizing them because activists take the pups and put them in panhandling and outrage videos. Rescue ranches quietly cooperating with labs get accused of giving cover to moral criminals.
But even unsentimental utilitarians want to minimize harm in the pursuit of good. What jumps out from Kaplan’s book and recent news in Washington is the scale of animal tests and the wantonness and uselessness of most of them.
The industry casts suffering creatures as “heroes” helping humanity. But the sacrifices leading to new treatments or scientific understanding are appallingly few. The main purpose seems to be maximizing employment for breeders, scientists, lab personnel, vice deans of research and FDA and NIH program officers.
As much as 90% of candidate drugs that seem promising in animal experiments don’t work or are too dangerous for humans, senior FDA adviser Tracy Beth Høeg said this summer at a workshop on reducing animal tests.
In any given year there are some 50,000 dogs in labs across the country, animal rights groups estimate, most of them beagles. Researchers use 111 million mice and rats a year, a recent Nature paper estimated.
“There’s a paranoia out there about the public seeing the numbers,” an animal-science administrator at Boston University told Kaplan.
Cold War researchers injected beagle pups with plutonium, radium, and strontium, logging the resulting tumors, disfigurations and deaths. The experiments left an EPA superfund site on one California campus including the radioactive remains of 800 dogs. Pavlov, the Nobelist known for salivating dogs, tortured his animals.
Dogs evolved to be loving and loyal to humans. Sentencing them to lab row is “a horrible betrayal,” dog cognition researcher Alexandra Horowitz tells Kaplan. A doctoral advisor told one junior scientist that her concerns about experimenting on animals made her “emotionally immature.”
Anguish over cruelty to animals goes back centuries. Kaplan might have mentioned that utilitarian Bentham was also an early animal rights advocate. The question is not whether animals can reason or talk, Bentham said, but “can they suffer?”
As long ago as 1876 the United Kingdom passed a Cruelty to Animals Act requiring licenses for animal experimentation. It was ineffective, Kaplan says.
The U.S. Animal Welfare Act has been updated eight times since its initial passage in the 1960s. But outrages continue. Three years ago state and federal authorities raided a beagle mill in Cumberland, Va., finding hundreds of dogs in “acute distress.”
The company paid millions in criminal fines and agreed to free thousands of dogs for adoption. Hammy and Kaplan were there to witness the liberation as vans and cars exited the chain-link stalag with beagles on board. Perhaps Hammy had a flashback.
Conservative distress about cruelty to animals goes back at least to Matthew Scully, a speechwriter for George W. Bush who in 2002 published Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. Scully was “an unexpected defender of the animals against the depredations of profit driven corporations,” The New York Times said in a review.
Recently conservative influencers realized they could amplify hatred of Anthony Fauci by adding NIH beagle abuse to the bill of complaint.
Kaplan is a nice writer who is generous in the book’s text with credits to her published sources. These show that much of what she covers should be familiar to people who follow the subject. But for those who don’t, Lab Dog is a discomfiting and timely dispatch as the tide seems to turn.