Beagles are the dog breed most often
used in animal testing, due to their size
and passive nature
Beagles are used in a wide range of research procedures: fundamental biological research, applied human medicine, applied veterinary medicine, and many others...
Dogs' status as "man's best friend" offers them no protection from being locked in lonely cages and forced to endure excruciating experiments. More than 75,000 dogs, including thousands of homeless animals from animal shelters, are tormented in U.S. laboratories every year. Worldwide hundreds of thousands of dogs are used and ultimately killed in cruel and absurd tests.
Dogs are a favored species in toxicology studies. In these studies, large doses of a test substance (a pharmaceutical, industrial chemical, pesticide, or household product) are pumped into animals' bodies, slowly poisoning them.
Dogs are also abused in human disease studies, including studies of heart and hormonal disorders. At Ohio State University, vivisector George Billman forced surgically manipulated dogs to run on a treadmill until they collapsed from a heart attack. The dogs were killed, and the damage to their heart tissue was studied.
In a violent experiment at the University of Pennsylvania, puppies were bred to have a degenerative eye disease that culminates in blindness. During the study, 3-week-old beagles had their eyes cut out and were killed, according to PETA.
Dogs' status as "man's best friend" offers them no protection from being locked in lonely cages and forced to endure excruciating experiments. More than 75,000 dogs, including thousands of homeless animals from animal shelters, are tormented in U.S. laboratories every year. Worldwide hundreds of thousands of dogs are used and ultimately killed in cruel and absurd tests.
Dogs are a favored species in toxicology studies. In these studies, large doses of a test substance (a pharmaceutical, industrial chemical, pesticide, or household product) are pumped into animals' bodies, slowly poisoning them.
Dogs are also abused in human disease studies, including studies of heart and hormonal disorders. At Ohio State University, vivisector George Billman forced surgically manipulated dogs to run on a treadmill until they collapsed from a heart attack. The dogs were killed, and the damage to their heart tissue was studied.
In a violent experiment at the University of Pennsylvania, puppies were bred to have a degenerative eye disease that culminates in blindness. During the study, 3-week-old beagles had their eyes cut out and were killed, according to PETA.
Their life before death...
Buffalo, a large, soppy-eyed beagle, is taking his exercise at Huntingdon Life Sciences. For 20 minutes he and 23 other beagles are released from their 6ft x 6ft pens and allowed to trot up and down the 60ft passage that separates the cages. Buffalo grubs at a plastic bone, and nuzzles one of his colleagues before being scooped up into the arms of his handler. "Hello my lovely, my little baby," she says, staring down with eyes almost as soppy as his. She has given all the dogs names she says, but Buffalo is her favourite.
Buffalo is 12 weeks into his life at Huntingdon, which has the capacity to house more than 1,000 beagles. He is used to the routine; he takes his breakfast, dosed with the substance he is here to test, at around 9am before being returned to the pen. Once an hour to a chorus of excited yelps, a technician walks the passage looking for signs of adverse reactions to the substance.
Commercial confidentiality prevents HLS from revealing the nature of the substance Buffalo and co are being exposed to but it could be an agri-chemical, a drug or a food additive. Once a week Buffalo is taken out and weighed, his urine and faeces collected for analysis, and once a month a blood sample is taken. In 40 weeks when the trial is concluded Buffalo will have reached the end of his useful life and will be killed with barbiturates, along with all the other dogs in the trial.
This is when the real work begins. Postmortems will be conducted. Samples of all major organs will be taken, slides prepared and treated before being passed to HLS's laboratories where the effects of the substance on the dogs are assessed. Meanwhile the next round of testing will have begun. Buffalo's pen will have been hosed down and another beagle will have taken his place.
This unsentimental production line is the way of animal-based research, and very few companies do more of it than HLS, Europe's largest contract research organisation.
Source
Buffalo is 12 weeks into his life at Huntingdon, which has the capacity to house more than 1,000 beagles. He is used to the routine; he takes his breakfast, dosed with the substance he is here to test, at around 9am before being returned to the pen. Once an hour to a chorus of excited yelps, a technician walks the passage looking for signs of adverse reactions to the substance.
Commercial confidentiality prevents HLS from revealing the nature of the substance Buffalo and co are being exposed to but it could be an agri-chemical, a drug or a food additive. Once a week Buffalo is taken out and weighed, his urine and faeces collected for analysis, and once a month a blood sample is taken. In 40 weeks when the trial is concluded Buffalo will have reached the end of his useful life and will be killed with barbiturates, along with all the other dogs in the trial.
This is when the real work begins. Postmortems will be conducted. Samples of all major organs will be taken, slides prepared and treated before being passed to HLS's laboratories where the effects of the substance on the dogs are assessed. Meanwhile the next round of testing will have begun. Buffalo's pen will have been hosed down and another beagle will have taken his place.
This unsentimental production line is the way of animal-based research, and very few companies do more of it than HLS, Europe's largest contract research organisation.
Source
November 2008 - For six months, a PETA undercover investigator worked in an Ohio lab where beagles were force-fed Oxycontin, a drug that had already been tested on animals and had been on the market in the U.S. for decades. The tests were conducted ostensibly to satisfy Japanese regulatory requirements. This case led to PETA's involvement in the International Conference on Harmonization, which works to streamline regulatory requirements for drug testing.
****Dogs' status as "man's best friend" offers them no protection from being locked in lonely cages and forced to endure excruciating experiments. More than 75,000 dogs, including thousands of homeless animals from animal shelters, are tormented in U.S. laboratories every year.
Dogs are a favored species in toxicology studies. In these studies, large doses of a test substance (a pharmaceutical, industrial chemical, pesticide, or household product) are pumped into animals' bodies, slowly poisoning them.
Dogs are also abused in human disease studies, including studies of heart and hormonal disorders. At Ohio State University, vivisector George Billman forced surgically manipulated dogs to run on a treadmill until they collapsed from a heart attack. The dogs were killed, and the damage to their heart tissue was studied.
In a violent experiment at the University of Pennsylvania, puppies were bred to have a degenerative eye disease that culminates in blindness. During the study, 3-week-old beagles had their eyes cut out and were killed.
****Dogs' status as "man's best friend" offers them no protection from being locked in lonely cages and forced to endure excruciating experiments. More than 75,000 dogs, including thousands of homeless animals from animal shelters, are tormented in U.S. laboratories every year.
Dogs are a favored species in toxicology studies. In these studies, large doses of a test substance (a pharmaceutical, industrial chemical, pesticide, or household product) are pumped into animals' bodies, slowly poisoning them.
Dogs are also abused in human disease studies, including studies of heart and hormonal disorders. At Ohio State University, vivisector George Billman forced surgically manipulated dogs to run on a treadmill until they collapsed from a heart attack. The dogs were killed, and the damage to their heart tissue was studied.
In a violent experiment at the University of Pennsylvania, puppies were bred to have a degenerative eye disease that culminates in blindness. During the study, 3-week-old beagles had their eyes cut out and were killed.
Undercover footage from inside Europe's largest animal testing laboratory Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) from 1997 - 2008.
The use of beagle dogs in research and testing of human drugs
By Andre Menache BSc (Hons) BVSc MRCVS
Please read the title again. As a veterinary surgeon, I find this title very strange. Why on earth are Beagle dogs being used to see what pharmaceutical drugs do to people? I would certainly never use a parrot to test drugs for horses, so why use dogs (or any other animal) to test human drugs? The short answer is that the law requires it. UK and EU laws require pharmaceutical drugs to be tested on a rodent (usually a rat) and a non-rodent species (usually a Beagle dog) before human clinical trials can begin.
This may sound like a reasonable idea to some people. It certainly seemed a reasonable principle 65 years ago when the laws governing drug testing and clinical trials were first formulated. After all, rats, dogs and people all have two eyes, two ears, a brain, a heart and so forth. Animals are similar to people. But how scientific is the word “similar” when one considers that humans share 50 percent of their DNA with a banana? Humans, rats and dogs share the gene for a tail. However, in people the gene is switched off, while in rats and dogs, the gene is switched on. We know that mice and people both share about the same 23 000 genes, but so what? Mice don’t resemble people. It’s less about the genes we share and more about what those genes do and how they network and interact with each other. That helps to explain why one complex system (the dog or the rat) cannot predict what will happen in another complex system (the human).
In other words, science has moved forward by 65 years since those early laws were written, but the laws have not yet caught up with the science (1). For example, we now have knowledge of the human genome, which we didn’t have 65 years ago. This new knowledge plus our expanding knowledge of how genes work, make animal tests look really out of place in the 21st century. Data published by the pharmaceutical industry confirm this. The chance of an animal test correctly predicting how a human will respond to a drug or a chemical is about as reliable as tossing a coin. Wow, that’s quite an accusation. Yes, indeed, and there is plenty of published scientific evidence to back that statement. See references 2 through to 19 below.
Let’s look at a real-life example of what we are talking about. Drug-induced liver damage in people is the most frequent reason cited for the withdrawal from the market of an approved drug, and it also accounts for more than 50 percent of acute liver failure in the United States (20). The figures for the UK are almost the same, where toxicity to the human liver is reported to be the second most common cause of drug failure through adverse effects in clinical trials of potential drugs (2, 21).
In other words, liver damage to people is caused by drugs after they were tested on rats and Beagle dogs, as required by law. Based on data from the pharmaceutical industry, the rat and dog experiments reveal liver damage approximately 50% of the time (22). That’s exactly the same result one would expect from tossing a coin.
Could it get any worse than that? Yes, it gets worse. The results of drug testing may be different on male rats and male Beagle dogs compared with females, due to differences in liver function in males and females (23, 24). That makes animal testing even less reliable than tossing a coin.
Most of us by now would realise that animal tests don’t work when it comes to human drugs. And most people would say, “Well if you don’t test on rats and Beagle dogs, how do you test new drugs?” There are two answers to this question.
Answer 1
The scientific evidence shows that testing on rats and Beagle dogs (or any other animal) is less reliable than tossing a coin, so we should stop doing it, regardless of whatever else is available to test drugs.
Answer 2
To comply with the law the pharmaceutical industry continues to test drugs on animals but the industry is well aware that animals cannot predict human outcome, which is why it is investing resources into human-based research methods that are relevant to people. These include human cell studies, human DNA studies, the use of donated human tissues, computer studies and much more. Most of these human-based methods are being improved upon all the time, to make them reliable for human drug testing. Most of these methods are not yet 100 percent predictive, but they are better than a coin toss (= animal tests) and they are relevant to people (25).
Conclusion
In the 65 years since the animal testing laws were introduced, scientific research has revolutionised our understanding of human biology and how it differs from other species. As a result of what we now know about the human body, the consequences of these 65 year old safety laws mandating animal tests, are not just that they have become outdated but are in fact recklessly and negligently exposing thousands of the population to the risk of death by their own medication (197,000 Adverse Drug Reaction deaths a year in Europe) (26).
The solution is quite simple. Our government and health authorities must remove the legal requirement for animal tests and replace them with test methods that are relevant to humans. And the sooner the better, for human health and animal welfare.
To get access to the list of references for Dr Menache's essay, please go to the website of Save the Harlan Beagles
Please read the title again. As a veterinary surgeon, I find this title very strange. Why on earth are Beagle dogs being used to see what pharmaceutical drugs do to people? I would certainly never use a parrot to test drugs for horses, so why use dogs (or any other animal) to test human drugs? The short answer is that the law requires it. UK and EU laws require pharmaceutical drugs to be tested on a rodent (usually a rat) and a non-rodent species (usually a Beagle dog) before human clinical trials can begin.
This may sound like a reasonable idea to some people. It certainly seemed a reasonable principle 65 years ago when the laws governing drug testing and clinical trials were first formulated. After all, rats, dogs and people all have two eyes, two ears, a brain, a heart and so forth. Animals are similar to people. But how scientific is the word “similar” when one considers that humans share 50 percent of their DNA with a banana? Humans, rats and dogs share the gene for a tail. However, in people the gene is switched off, while in rats and dogs, the gene is switched on. We know that mice and people both share about the same 23 000 genes, but so what? Mice don’t resemble people. It’s less about the genes we share and more about what those genes do and how they network and interact with each other. That helps to explain why one complex system (the dog or the rat) cannot predict what will happen in another complex system (the human).
In other words, science has moved forward by 65 years since those early laws were written, but the laws have not yet caught up with the science (1). For example, we now have knowledge of the human genome, which we didn’t have 65 years ago. This new knowledge plus our expanding knowledge of how genes work, make animal tests look really out of place in the 21st century. Data published by the pharmaceutical industry confirm this. The chance of an animal test correctly predicting how a human will respond to a drug or a chemical is about as reliable as tossing a coin. Wow, that’s quite an accusation. Yes, indeed, and there is plenty of published scientific evidence to back that statement. See references 2 through to 19 below.
Let’s look at a real-life example of what we are talking about. Drug-induced liver damage in people is the most frequent reason cited for the withdrawal from the market of an approved drug, and it also accounts for more than 50 percent of acute liver failure in the United States (20). The figures for the UK are almost the same, where toxicity to the human liver is reported to be the second most common cause of drug failure through adverse effects in clinical trials of potential drugs (2, 21).
In other words, liver damage to people is caused by drugs after they were tested on rats and Beagle dogs, as required by law. Based on data from the pharmaceutical industry, the rat and dog experiments reveal liver damage approximately 50% of the time (22). That’s exactly the same result one would expect from tossing a coin.
Could it get any worse than that? Yes, it gets worse. The results of drug testing may be different on male rats and male Beagle dogs compared with females, due to differences in liver function in males and females (23, 24). That makes animal testing even less reliable than tossing a coin.
Most of us by now would realise that animal tests don’t work when it comes to human drugs. And most people would say, “Well if you don’t test on rats and Beagle dogs, how do you test new drugs?” There are two answers to this question.
Answer 1
The scientific evidence shows that testing on rats and Beagle dogs (or any other animal) is less reliable than tossing a coin, so we should stop doing it, regardless of whatever else is available to test drugs.
Answer 2
To comply with the law the pharmaceutical industry continues to test drugs on animals but the industry is well aware that animals cannot predict human outcome, which is why it is investing resources into human-based research methods that are relevant to people. These include human cell studies, human DNA studies, the use of donated human tissues, computer studies and much more. Most of these human-based methods are being improved upon all the time, to make them reliable for human drug testing. Most of these methods are not yet 100 percent predictive, but they are better than a coin toss (= animal tests) and they are relevant to people (25).
Conclusion
In the 65 years since the animal testing laws were introduced, scientific research has revolutionised our understanding of human biology and how it differs from other species. As a result of what we now know about the human body, the consequences of these 65 year old safety laws mandating animal tests, are not just that they have become outdated but are in fact recklessly and negligently exposing thousands of the population to the risk of death by their own medication (197,000 Adverse Drug Reaction deaths a year in Europe) (26).
The solution is quite simple. Our government and health authorities must remove the legal requirement for animal tests and replace them with test methods that are relevant to humans. And the sooner the better, for human health and animal welfare.
To get access to the list of references for Dr Menache's essay, please go to the website of Save the Harlan Beagles
Animal experiments represent one of the most grotesque of blunders in medical history; let us get rid of them and replace them with good science. Good science should be species specific, should do no harm and be evidence based.
With the ending of animal experimentation, a great evil will be lifted from the earth, which will have untold and far-reaching benefits for health and the life on this planet (Dr Andre Menache)
With the ending of animal experimentation, a great evil will be lifted from the earth, which will have untold and far-reaching benefits for health and the life on this planet (Dr Andre Menache)