One Year Later:
The lucky ones. But there are so many others – suffering.
Maybe you remember: just about a year ago more than 4,000 beagles were rescued from a mass animal breeding facility in Cumberland, Virginia. The Humane Society of America, in conjunction with many other animal rescue organizations, emptied the labs and cages of a site which belongs to Envigo, a company that breeds live animals and sells them to any agency that performs animal-testing services.
A seven-month investigation by the U.S. Department of Agriculture had revealed deplorable conditions: dead puppies, lack of food, sick animals who would simply be euthanized (with illegal methods, on top of it) instead of being examined by a veterinarian, animals were crowded into small, filthy, sweltering cages, and their food was covered in insects and feces.1 I wrote about this huge rescue operation last August.
This year, some of the people who adopted a beagle together with several rescues organized a number of anniversary bashes. Meet Mabel who was used for breeding: starting at six months, she had one puppy litter after the other, for seven years. "Going outside, seeing birds, and all these things were new to her," said her new owner, PETA’s HR director Natalie Hawkins. Mabel was timid, had never played with a toy or received a treat. Once she got comfortable with her new family, she happily explored her new surroundings: the beach, grass, people. Mabel is "excited about absolutely everything", according to Hawkins.2
Watch this delightful PETA video about Mabel’s transformation.
The Helen Woodward Animal Shelter near San Diego, California took in 43 of the rescued beagles. They organized a birthday bash for shelter dogs with no known birthday, and beagles Sheffield, Cambridge, and Wales happily participated, enjoying pup cakes, presents, and special attention from adoring staff members.3
Homeward Trails Animal Rescue who had agreed to find homes for over 400 beagles from Envigo also posted a video on YouTube: the first anniversary of freedom.
Many people don't realize that an average of 60,000 dogs just like these are still used in laboratories each year. Even as we celebrate these lucky dogs going to loving homes, we're focused on creating a future where no dogs will face that kind of fate.
said Kitty Block, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States.4 The four rescued beagles who participated, Mia, Rose, Chewy, and Khali, all have found their furever homes.
Video by Homeward Trails.
But that’s the end of good news, I’m afraid. While the Cumberland, Virginia facility has indeed been shut down, Envigo is now a subsidiary of Inotiv, a multinational company that owns more than 60,000 animals – they currently hold tens of thousands of monkeys, pigs, rabbits, rodents, and more at their other sites. Neither the consent decree between the Federal Government (United States Department of Agriculture [“USDA”]) and Envigo, nor the transfer plan which allowed the Humane Society of the United States to safely, efficiently, and humanely remove the beagles from the Cumberland Facility and assume ownership and physical custody of them, included any criminal prosecution. And it doesn’t prevent Envigo or the parent company Inotiv from simply opening a new facility, even in Virginia, and continuing with their horrendous Cumberland practices.
In 2022 the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 was passed, which eliminated the previous requirement of the Food and Drug Administration that all new drugs first be tested on animals. Unfortunately this only means that new drugs don’t HAVE to be tested on animals before they can be approved for humans. Hopefully a future version of this legislation will make all animal testing and experimentation totally illegal. With organs-on-a-chip, three-dimensional tissue models, supercomputers, and artificial intelligence, outdated animal research is no longer necessary.
I’d like to think that humanity has evolved a little when it comes to the way we treat non-human animals. Circuses with performing animals, tigers that have to jump through a ring of fire or elephants that have to balance on two legs aren’t popular any more. Many people consider zoos to be detrimental to animals’ well-being. The number of vegetarians and vegans is growing. Animal law programs are being offered at over 160 schools today, compared to only nine classes in 2000.5 And yet… When one looks closer into animal testing, it feels like being caught in a bad science fiction story or nightmare.
We’re familiar with Pavlovian reflex research on dogs, but did you know that Ivan Pavlov’s studies involved drilling a hole into the side of a dog’s mouth and surgically implanting a tube to collect saliva? And I certainly did not know that Pavlov and his assistant Nikolay Krasnogorsky performed similar experiments on orphaned children.
Over 100 million vertebrate animals are used for animal testing annually. That’s a big business, and the companies involved in this lucrative trade won’t easily consent to research methods which don’t rely on animals. The National Association for Biomedical Research, for example, a non-profit organization which lobbies in support of animal research, is fighting the designation of the long-tailed macaque as endangered under the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) listing criteria. And they’re trying to pressure the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reverse their decision to deny import permits for Cambodian non-human primates. A decision that was celebrated by PETA because the animals were falsely labeled as “captive-bred”, a crime that appears to be enabled by greedy American animal experimenters and that was decimating wild populations instead.
While doing research for this piece, I came across one other Frankenstein-like item: Göttingen Minipigs, a product provided by Ellegaard, an international biomedical research company. They also offer genetically altered Göttingen Minipigs, and even a humanized variation!
The humanized huIgG1/4 Göttingen Minipigs, a genetically altered Göttingen Minipigs strain carrying a mini repertoire of human genes for the immunoglobulin heavy chains γ1 and γ4 and the immunoglobulin light chain κ, are now available at Ellegaard Göttingen Minipigs.
Right. More than anything, it sounds creepy. I hope the days for animal testing, experimentation, animal research, vivisection, and other exploitative practices are limited.
thanks for speaking on behalf of these lovely creatures and sharing their plight.
Dear Friend Jessica, we share some lovely attitudes, eh? You have inspired me to start writing my own essays through Substack.
Cherished memories, in lieu of an actual hard copy journal. This one of yours created visions for me of our better angels, Animal Rescuers.
Blessed Be They
PS
As always, thank you for this poignant post!