How Animals Wind Up In Laboratories
How Animals Wind Up In Laboratories
How Animals
Wind Up in Labs
Companion Animals
Many
dogs and cats used in laboratory experiments come from companies that
breed animals for research purposes. Others were once trusting
companions who simply got lost–or stolen–from their families.
Pound Seizure
Animal
shelters in certain states are required to turn over homeless dogs to
government-run facilities for medical experiments if they are not
claimed by former or new guardians within five days of arriving at the
shelter. This is commonly known as pound seizure.
Three
states require pound seizure of government-run facilities: Minnesota,
Oklahoma, and Utah. Thirteen states, including Connecticut, Delaware,
Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New
York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and West Virginia, forbid
pound seizure. Most other states have no law and leave it up to county
or town governments to decide.
Class A Dealers
Anyone selling animals to laboratories or selling more than 24 dogs or cats per year at the wholesale level must be licensed. Class A dealers maintain their own breeding colonies, such as puppy mills.
According
to the States News Service, Class A dealers or breeders who choose to
release animals for research; people who donate their companion animals
to research; and private and federal facilities that breed animals are
capable of supplying far more cats and dogs than are required by current
laboratory demand.
Class B Dealers
Anyone
18 or older who is willing to pay a fee can obtain a U.S. Department of
Agriculture (USDA) Class B dealer license. In states that allow pound
seizure, Class B dealers may buy animals from pounds and animal
shelters. “Bunchers” are also a vital source of animals in the dealers’
network. Using sedatives hidden in meat, females in heat, and nets, they
lure or trap dogs and cats. Some thieves pose as animal control
officers and comb neighborhoods in vans, “confiscating” animals without
tags. Many bunchers also purchase litters from unsuspecting people who
allow their animal companions to breed and obtain animals from “Free to a
Good Home” advertisements.
C.C. Baird, the largest and most
notorious Class B animal dealer in the United States, purchased animals
from people using false addresses and non-existent driver’s license
numbers. In March 2004, after years of efforts by animal protection
organizations, the USDA filed a 108-page complaint listing hundreds of
violations against CC Baird, his wife, Patsy, and their daughters,
Jeanette and Patricia.
States News Service reports that there are
about 50 “random source” animal dealers across the United States. They
often keep hundreds of animals in squalid conditions and give them
little food and water. These animals often are eventually sold to
research laboratories for $200 to $500 each.
Primates
Chimpanzees
and other primates used in US laboratories are primarily captive-bred.
Unwanted chimpanzees from zoos and circuses are sometimes sold to
laboratories. Poachers also shoot chimpanzee mothers and take their
infants for research. Many of the captured baby chimpanzees die before
they reach the laboratory.
The Oregon National Primate Research
Center brags that it maintains colonies of rhesus monkeys, snow monkeys,
vervets, and baboons who were taken from the wild and/or brought to the
center from other facilities.
From
the jungle or savannah to the laboratory, every moment of the captured
primate’s experience is characterized by sickness, despair, fear,
loneliness, and terror! Many primates die during quarantine and
transport into the United States, with the mortality rate reaching a
high of 20 percent at one point, according to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC). Those who survive the miserable journeys
from their homes are funneled into gruesome, painful, repetitive, and
often pointless experiments from which few emerge alive.
Rodents and Other Animals
Birds,
frogs, pigs, sheep, cattle, and many naturally free-roaming animals
(e.g., prairie dogs and owls) are also common victims of
experimentation. So are mice, rats, guinea pigs, hamsters, gerbils, and
rabbits.
Most small animals used in laboratory experiments are
bred by callous companies who view animals as little more than walking
pin cushions and test tubes with whiskers. For example, Charles River
Laboratories is one of the world’s largest suppliers of rats, mice,
hamsters, gerbils, rabbits, guinea pigs, and other animals for
laboratory experiment.s. The Jackson Laboratory supplies approximately 2
million specially bred JAX Mice to major universities, medical schools,
and research laboratories in the world every year.
Life in a Laboratory
Imagine living locked inside a closet without control over any aspect of your life.
You
can’t choose when and what you eat, how you will spend your time,
whether or not you will have a partner and children, and if you do, who
that partner will be. You can’t even decide when the lights go on and
off.
Think about spending your entire life like this, even though you have committed no crime.
This is life in a laboratory for animals!
It is deprivation, isolation, and misery!
Now
consider all the specialized needs of the species imprisoned for
experimentation. Chimpanzees, in their natural homes, are never
separated from their families and troops. They spend hours together
every day, grooming each other and making soft nests for sleeping each
night. They are loving and protective parents, and baby chimps will live
close to their mothers for many years. But in a laboratory, chimpanzees
are caged alone. There are no families, no companions, no grooming, no
nests. There are only cold, hard steel bars and loneliness that goes on
for so many years that most chimpanzees sink into depression, eventually
losing their minds.
Rats and mice are denied a place to dig and
hide. Dogs and cats are deprived of exercise, affection, and the homes
that they long for with families to care for them. Rabbits have no room
to leap. Pigs cannot root in the ground or build their nests. Even when
the cages are clean–and this is not always the case–the animals are not
allowed to engage in any normal behavior.
On top of the deprivation,
there are the experiments
Animals
are infected with diseases that they would never normally contract–tiny
mice grow tumors as large as their own bodies, kittens are purposely
blinded, rats are made to suffer seizures. Experimenters force-feed
chemicals to animals, conduct repeated surgeries on them, implant wires
in their brains, crush their spines, and much more.
Think of what it would be like to endure this and then be dumped back into a cage, usually without any painkillers!
Video
footage from inside laboratories shows that animals cower in fear every
time someone walks by their cages. They don’t know if they will be
dragged from their prison cells for an injection, blood withdrawal, a
painful procedure or surgery, or death. Often animals see other animals
killed right in front of them!
