Beagles In Experimentation: Still Our Best Friends?

Many people do not know that dogs and cats are used routinely for experimentation in the United States. Beagles in particular are one of the dogs most commonly used in scientific labs, partly for their manageable size and partly for their agreeable demeanor. It is one of the ironies of laboratory work: often the friendliest and most docile of animals are used because they are the easiest to work with, and their trusting and kind personalities are repaid by being subjected to cruel tests. The sociability of laboratory dogs, in particular, is one of those strange things that some scientists can study with a detachment that allows them to acknowledge the social needs of dogs while inhibiting the needs of their test subjects.

Still, scientists who study dog welfare in laboratories do so because they say “reduction or absence of stress during laboratory procedures is highly desirable in view of animal welfare. Less stressed animals imply less stress for the care staff.” There is a desire on the part of researchers to not only make their work more efficient, but also to make sure data is reliable and to reduce their own stress. As this study on beagle behaviour in labs notes, “experimental data resulting from studies carried out on calm, well-adjusted animals are likely to be more consistent and meaningful, whereas distress can lead to physiological changes in the animal.” In other words, dogs who don’t show stress in the laboratory setting are not only easier to work with, they supposedly provide more reliable data in tests.

To assess how laboratory beagles reacted to stress and new situations, researchers took 90 purpose-bred beagles, separated them into different facilities, and put them in situations with various types of enrichment, exposing them to everything from novel objects to alarming sounds to unfamiliar people. The dogs had been trained specifically to live in labs and they were kept in very specific environmental conditions to keep the data as controlled as possible. The point of the research was to “choose stimuli and situations which were unknown to all dogs in the four facilities… to set value on the behavior of the dogs when being alone in an unfamiliar room…” and to thus “provide information about the dogs’ certitude or incertitude in different situations and thus may be a useful tool future rehoming of the dogs to private homes.”

The results show a very broad range of reactions from different dogs in different facilities, and the best conclusions that the researchers could make were that “the behavior of laboratory dogs as assessed in our test is affected by their sex, age and origin. Male and older dogs performed more confidently and with less anxiety than did female and younger dogs, and facility-bred dogs yielded significantly higher scores (e.g., they were less anxious) than dogs not bred in that facility.”

For advocates, such studies are a double-edged sword: on one hand, they prove that dogs are used in experiments – something many members of the public still fail to acknowledge – and they also show how much dogs in a laboratory retain their personalities and suffer in the laboratory setting. On the other hand, it is certainly distressing to read about such tests, not only because they directly indicate that dogs are being held in captivity for testing, but because they indirectly point to even more horrific types of experiments.

Of the various takeaways that such studies can have, perhaps the most important is evidence that dogs are capable of a wide variety of responses driven by fear and/or anxiety, and that such reactions are hard to predict. While one of the purposes of this study – facilitating the release of dogs to private homes – is certainly a noble cause, from an advocacy perspective we need to find ways to ensure that dogs don’t end up in these labs in the first place.