The “Beagle Bill,” which became a state law in 2022, promised to save the lives of tens of thousands of healthy cats and dogs (mostly beagles) who would otherwise be euthanized when no longer needed by research facilities in Massachusetts. Now these animals may be welcomed by rescue organizations for adoption as companions to caring people.
As wonderful as that sounds, thousands of their counterparts, as well as other species, remain behind bars in laboratories run by educational institutions, government entities, scientific enterprises or medical industries. According to federal reports quoted by PETA, Charles River Laboratories, the world’s largest breeder of animals for application in experimentation, utilized in one year “16,460 nonhuman primates, 12,531 rabbits, 9,099 dogs, 4,815 guinea pigs, 2,739 hamsters, 2,086 pigs, 207 cats, 16 sheep, and hundreds of thousands of other animals who aren’t required by law to be counted.”
Agencies that address the standard of care nonhuman animals receive at federally funded research establishments include the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which employs only 120 inspectors who are responsible for ensuring compliance for more than 12,000 facilities, and the Public Health Service, which oversees testing at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and is similarly understaffed and inadequate. The Animal Welfare Act, a federal law that addresses the standard of care for nonhuman animals at research facilities, provides only minimal protection and excludes roughly 95% of the species utilized, such as birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and, overwhelmingly, rodents.
Mice and rats comprise more than 90% of nonhuman animals used in experimentation, yet none of these sentient and social creatures are afforded even a minimal federal, state or local legal buffer concerning humane treatment. Standards for the conditions and sizes of their cages, what they are fed (or not fed), how they are handled, and the amount of pain to which they must submit may be left, if at all, to the discretion of an administrator, but likely rests with the humans who perform the experiments. In other words, no one but those in direct contact with these animals, and the animals themselves, knows what they endure during their interminable subsistence in captivity. It’s hard to imagine the fear and despair for that multitude in each minute of every day.
Although other species used in research are permitted some legal oversight for the “care” they receive, their status as property limits the extent of the safeguards. Most of us are raised to accept the idea of nonhuman animals as commodities meant to service us, with little or no consideration given to the extent they suffer or are exploited. They are used as food, garments, organ mines, bomb sniffers, astronauts and, of course, subjects in countless laboratories. Affording them too much legal protection would compromise the comforts to which we humans are accustomed.
Development of pharmaceuticals, industrial chemicals, food additives and cosmetics is heavily dependent on utilization of nonhuman animals who must endure countless invasive procedures. Testing is done to determine immediate and long-term effects on brain and body; therefore, little regard is paid to the level of harm inflicted, a level intentionally measured and recorded to avert what’s recognized as impermissible: potentially unpleasant, intolerable or dangerous reactions in humans. However, about 90% of medicines tested on nonhuman animals ultimately fail in human trials! Just as inexplicably, the Three Rs Principle — which, for more than 70 years, has sought to reduce the numbers of nonhuman animals in testing, refine their treatment, and replace current methods with in vitro protocols and the ethical use of human subjects — has miscarried its objectives.
Non-animal alternatives do exist, and they are often not only faster and less expensive to employ, but also more accurate and effective at predicting how the human body will respond to drugs, chemicals and treatments. But, until passage of the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 in December 2022, the U.S. government mandated that all investigational drugs be tested on nonhuman animals before being advanced to human trials. Now, fortunately, scientifically proven alternatives, such as cell-based assays, 3D tissue cultures, stem cell research, microfluidic chips, computational and mathematical models using metadatabases, and clinical research on human volunteers, are allowed. Yet, despite this myriad of cutting-edge options, the fallacy of a correlation between nonhuman and human outcomes for medicines, and, of course, the continued outcry from advocates, conventional testing remains a widely accepted practice. More humans need to ask why.
Cited Information:
https://headlines.peta.org/what-charles-river-laboratories-doesnt-want-you-to-know
https://aldf.org/article/federal-laws-and-agencies-involved-with-animal-testing
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452302X1930316X
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/02611929241241187
https://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/air/alternatives
Deb Newman is president of the newly established nonprofit Speak Up For Animals, whose purpose is to advocate for the welfare and protection of wildlife and companion animals in Swampscott and elsewhere in Massachusetts. Most recently, Newman was at the forefront in the defense of Nahant’s coyote population, co-authored Swampscott’s Coyote Management Plan, and drafted Swampscott’s bylaw on wildlife feeding.