Forty male beagles raised inside a lab in Spain arrived in Los Angeles last week where they will be put up for adoption after being freed from captivity by the Beagle Freedom Project. The rescue mission is the largest yet for the group Animal Rescue Media Education (ARME). A total of 72 dogs were rescued in the effort, 32 of them having already been adopted in Europe, according to NBC Los Angeles.
ARME’s Beagle Freedom Project spokesman Gary Smith said the beagles, all between ages 4 and 7, had lived in cages their entire lives. “We’ve been told they lived one per cage in rooms of 10 beagles, but they never had any physical interaction with one another,” Smith told the station. “They’ve been in kennels since they were rescued about a week ago, but aside from that, they’ve spent most of their lives locked up.”
THESE dogs were rescued? Meanwhile==how many others were put to sleep? And the transportation cost was…………
Look here……….but don’t look there!
Silly Hoomans. Animals are put here for our use–just as they do us. Proops on Red Eye last night said the only relevant issues regarding animals were “fit” and “taste.” Ha, ha.
But how we treat them does say something about “us” and when I say “us” I mean the psychiatrically challenged among us.
I more or less agree with bobbo on this one. They could have saved more animals by spending the money locally but for some reason that wasn’t what was important…Of course they could have saved quite a few human lives with the same money but that wasn’t important either…
Do-ill==so we come together on Animal Rights? Hmmm. Several steps in the right direction. Now all we have to do is get you to recognize your bestial nature, then who knows what path of discovery will be taken once this door of perception is opened and walked thru?
Ohhhh, the future is so bright, I gotta carry Kibbles with me.
Snack on what you like. I prefer beef jerky.
Say Mr deowll–once again you never take my bait. Still just a lock stepped dyed in the wool ultra conservative==unless you are part of the upper part of the 1%–truly cutting your own throat with every political stand you take. Yet you evidence good humor?
How do you account for this?
You’ve learned not to take offense from obvious idiots that disagree with you?
You have low reading comprehension and take all your positions aurally?
Special drug regimen?
What makes you so calm and steady, unchanging/unresponsive to reality====happy?
Across the spectrum, good example for us all===other than the thinking part of what you post.
Yea, verily.
“Animals are put here for our use–just as they do us.”
By whom….God? I always knew you were a closet Christian.
Thats a good cop McCullough. Not very anti-theist is it? -or- why is that statement not simply an anti-Peta/Animal “Rights” statement? Yeah, the christian meme is very pervasive in our culture. The bible, Shakespeare, Doctor Seuss–all our cultural heritage.
So, on point: nothing was “put here” as in an intentional act. Rather, all thats here evolved out of the nothingness we think that somethingness sprang from. What IS outside the universe? What was there before the Big Bang? Blows my mind. but animals and plants all feed off of each other. The idea of cruelty becomes totally manufactured. Why do we react to a dogs yelp? More bacteria in each human than there are humans on earth? Part of our cell structure was actually our proto ancestors being invaded and occupied by symbiotic bacteria?
Fascinating stuff–what we are. The real story so much more mystical than God did it. Yes, a real miracle.
Don’t whip me McCullough!
Prefer they used something other then beagles, chihuahuas, pekinese , bobbo, or alfie, you know something close to a human analogue or something useless for anything else.
Lumping anyone in with Alfie is really quite cruel. Even Pedro would be better. He has a donkey……….its party time!!!!
These dogs would be so screwed up that they would be difficult to re-home.
Not against animal testing but as a beagle owner, that is just the suck.
Although all dogs are pack animals and generally like to be around other animals (Dogs, cats, humans), beagles are one of those breeds that are ESPECIALLY big on pack behaviour and to keep them permanently locked up with no interaction is quite cruel. A kind of cruel that is not needed for the experiment to be carried out.
So they spend a fortune to rescue damaged animals (who knows what they’ve been tested with!) then fly them at great expense to find homes in a State that tries to outlaw pet ownership? (Or, maybe it was just SF?)
By the way, after being rescued from isolation won’t they be required to spend a couple of weeks in US Customs isolation/quarantine?
My experience with bringing my own pets back to the States was just a cert from the vet that they had all the shots and were healthy. No Quarantine.
I don’t travel with pets (don’t have any these days – had a macaque in Angola for a while) so my info is probably outdated. At least until TSA hears about it!
Now if we could rescue the American people from their cages, then we would have something.
The blackboard gag, on this weekend’s rerun of The Simpsons, read “Guinea Pigs shall not be used as guinea pigs.” LOL
This idea of FREEDOM for these dogs sounds just like the FREEDOM America promotes….
‘Do as I say. I’ll control if, when and what you are fed. And you will love it!’
If we want more distraction, wait one year for the heart rending tale of a beagle which was rescued from a Spanish animal testing lab only to be rehoused with someone who mis-streated it. (but the dog pulls through)
Maybe using animals is why some of our drugs are so bad for humans in terms of effectiveness and side effects. Their is enough differences in animals and humans to not discover all the problems. I for one think testing should be done on humans and if we balk at that ideal. Then why would we think its OK to test on animals? Human testing would certainly give more accurate results?
Sorry McCullough but I just couldn’t help myself. This news is a bit old but a great one at that. I wish it was done here too even if it’s like what Jay and Silent Bob did but I guess it must be harder than it is.
I actually work for one of the big pharma companies. I know one of the folks that is charge of the animal’s welfare in the testing facility and they take pretty good care of them. I wouldn’t say they get to run in the grass but their health and happiness is of the utmost importance, it makes them better test subjects.
They have beagles just like the ones in the video and they regularly adopt them out, once a year maybe? It’s not to big fan fair though, they do it through a local animal shelter. I’ve heard the practice criticized because the animals are likely to have nerve or neurological damage due to whatever testing was done but my understanding is any dog that was irreversibly harmed by the testing is destroyed.
As far as the drama the video depicts. It would proly be the same if you took a bunch of house cats outside and let them go. It’s of zero significance of how they were treated or how they will be treated in the future.
#20–Jay==good to know. Can you confirm, deny, say something else to the point of why animal testing rather than human testing? I assume AFTER animal testing that human testing of some sort does take place without exception==or what would those exceptions be?
I assume “make up” is not tested to the same standards as drugs? But I could be wrong?
It’s my knowledge that animal testing in and of itself is very heavily regulated. The FDA requires that drugs being dispersed into the market need to be verified “safe” by means of real life testing. Pharma’s actually have a wide range of animals that they test on. I don’t know the real terms for this stuff so I’ll explain it as best I can. The animals in a testing lab are comprised of various complexities. On the ends of the spectrum are mice, the simplest and the chimp, the most complicated. Those are the two you hear about most often but there are actually a ton of other animals there, dogs as we’ve seen, ferrets, and a whole bunch of others, iguanas? I can’t recall them all but I remember being surprised when I heard them from the lab folks(this was a while ago).
For a drug to be certified it needs to be tested by a specific testing class according to the drugs makeup and target use after that it goes to human testing and ultimately certification. Say one drug may be fine with passing tests on a ferret, another may be fine with mice and another may require going all the way to the chimps. Pharma’s don’t specify this, outside regulations do, the FDA in this case.
The reason they don’t test on the most complicated animals first is cost, in terms of life impact and money. The lab folks prefer to use the more basic animals. I think it also makes their jobs easier in general. As a result of this the lab is populated mostly but the lesser organisms going up. I think we have 2 chimps maybe a dozen dogs, hundreds of mice? I’m pulling number out of my ass hear but that’s my understanding.
And the lab mice they use are no joke. They’ve engineered the mice to have the same genealogical makeup as humans. So the mice react in a way very accurately to a human. I asked why they test on dogs when the mice may be a better choice because they are so customized and was told that the FDA doesn’t recognize the advances with the mice and they still have to go up the animal chain with their testing. Another cool thing with the lab mice is that they are all cloned. So the tests that a lab is running on a mouse in germany can be duplicated exactly by a lab in the US, on the same exact mouse.
So to answer your question, to my limited knowledge, all animal testing is followed by human testing. Make-up testing, I have no idea.
I should also say that I am in no way an authority on this, I don’t work in the testing labs. I just know a few folks that do and ask a lot of questions. I’ve always heard to many negative things about animal testing that I was really curious to find out how they really go about it.
My way of looking at animal “rights” may be novel to me and I welcome comments:
1) Although animals don’t have human rights, a few species exist within our own ethical/moral boundaries because they are adopted members of humanity. The short list would be dogs, cats and horses.
We treat them differently than other animals because they are part of us.
2) Animals that are closer to humans on the evolutionary grid also fall within human ethical norms. Primates, of course, but also other animals that have sentience.
Could have done with a LOOOOTTTTT less “yaaay’s
Sappy music ID: the first song is Songbird by Christine McVie off of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours album.
Thanks for the heads up, I will avoid. I like Fleetwood Mac before the chicks joined them.