The Ethics Of Animal Testing

0:07What would you sacrifice to push forward efforts to eliminate deadly diseases? What about to make sure our products and medicines are safe, especially for our most vulnerable? These questions lead us to ethical quagmires surrounding the use of animals for research, testing, and experimentation. Some of you shared your thoughts with us. This is Kate in Vermont. Animals do not exist for the purposes of people, to cure them, to heal them, to prevent them from getting sick or injured. I think the fact that labs still experiment on live animals, especially dogs and cats, is abhorrent and it needs to be stopped.

0:45Humanity should have evolved enough by now to not make other animals suffer for ourselves. This is Judy Ingram from Rancho Cordova, California. I'm so tired of hearing about experiments done on rats or mice mentioned so casually and with no concern for their pain. Long ago, Cardinal Newman said about animal experimentation, he said there is something so very dreadful in tormenting those who have never harmed us and who cannot defend themselves and are utterly in our power. Thanks for those messages. We've long heard the term lab rat. It's an expression of understanding that animals are used in scientific spaces.

1:25Although rats are the most widely used animal, they are far from the only one. Around 40 ,000 dogs were used in labs last year. that's according to a leading advocacy group. The most common breed used are beagles. Journalist Melanie Kaplan adopted Hammy in 2013, a beagle who had been used for research for nearly four years, and it led her to a years-long journey to find out more about Hammy's past and about the complex world of animal testing. It took her to a sanctuary farm for former research animals in Wyoming, a naked mole rat lab in Boston University, and the homes of former researchers and many more.

2:01She wrote about it all in her new book, Lab Dog, a Beagle and is Human, Investigate the Surprising World of Animal Research. Melanie joins us after the break to talk about her research and her book. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. Stay with us. We've got a lot to get to.

2:22Melanie, welcome to the program. Jen, thank you. It's such a pleasure to be here. We mentioned your beagle, Hammy. He was a lab dog, and you found him through the organization, the Beagle Freedom Project. It rescues dogs from laboratories. Tell us about the day you met Hammy and the other dogs that were rescued. So, Jen, I really did not expect to adopt Hammy. I was going there with the intention of fostering a dog, and I didn't know anything about dogs in research other than what I'd read from the organization. And I saw this dog and this group of seven dogs kind of walking around on the grass and taking in the sights and sounds.

2:59And when I brought Hammy home, he was pretty scared. He shook for a long time, and I didn't know if I was ready to take on adopting this dog and having him in my life. Because he would require a lot of care. He required a lot of patience. And once I decided to adopt him, I just felt incredibly lucky every day I had with him because I realized and learned later that most dogs and most animals do not make it out of the lab. So I was lucky to spend a decade with him and be with him into his old age, and it just felt like an honor. What were those first days and even weeks like with him? Because you describe his level of fear and the way he relates to the outside world.

3:43It's very difficult for him. He was scared of all the sounds out in my neighborhood. I live in the city, and things would set him off very quickly. We would joke because sometimes we'd walk down the sidewalk and a leaf would fall off a tree and he would kind of crouch and shudder. But, you know, I thought about him being in a confined space for years and just not used to these stimuli. And it did take a while. I think that he was open to me from the beginning, which was great, but new situations were really hard for him to get used to. You had Hami for eight years before you started this process of discovery around animal research.

4:24What made you start to look for these answers? I think for a while I was just repeating, here's my dog. He was in a lab. Here's the tattoo in his ear. And I finally had some time during the pandemic to think about, okay, what do I want to write about next? And there were these questions I realized I wasn't addressing because this is a really difficult topic. And it's difficult to talk about. It was difficult to write about. But it's also something that I hope through Hammy and my love for him comes through to people as consumers and as voters that we need to understand this is happening. It's been behind closed doors for a long time.

5:09And so I just had all these questions. And as a journalist, I just decided I need to get some answers. I need to find out really what's happening and why he was bred in the first place. Why are beagles primarily used in research? So the pat answer is that they are docile and they're friendly and they're very compliant. But what I learned is that there's a whole infrastructure put in place generations ago because beagles were brought over to the U.S. as hunting dogs. And so there were kennels of hunting dogs, and they were always trying to breed a better beagle for hunting. And so really they just pivoted from breeding a beagle that had good hunting characteristics to a beagle who was good for testing.

5:55In those early days, they were testing radiation on beagles, and then they started testing pharmaceuticals. But they had this system in place where they had a standard beagle, and that's by far the largest breed used in research today. Melanie, in the book you look at several ways animals are used, from surgical practice and veterinary schools. Just share with us some of the different ways animals are used in testing. Yeah, I like to break it into three categories. So you've got basic research, which is often answering a scientific question, like how something like addiction works or how a disease develops in the body.

6:34And then you have product testing. So say you're a company and you have a drug or a pesticide or a cleaner, and you want to make sure that it's not affecting us, it's not giving us cancer or having reproductive effects. And so those tests are often toxicity tests. They give the animals very high doses of the drug, and then they euthanize them to see how it affects their tissues and organs. And then, as you mentioned, education. Until 2007, dogs were used in many, if not all, medical schools. And then finally dogs were phased out. They were using pigs, live pigs. And then by 2016, all live animals had stopped being used in medical schools.

7:21But they are still used in veterinary training and some more advanced medical training. Now, one 2016 study found that 95 % of warm-blooded animals used in labs are mice and rats. But they're not covered under what's called the Animal Welfare Act. It was put in place in 1996. Explain what that is and why it only covers some animals. So, yes, the Animal Welfare Act regulates some of the care and transportation and inspection of animal facilities. It doesn't say anything about ethics. And as you said, it also doesn't include most of the animals, most mice and rats, most birds. It doesn't include any fish or invertebrates.

8:06And so that's really the majority. If you're doing research on mice, there's really no limit to a regulation to what you can do to them. And so when we look at how that act was put in place, what was the push for certain animals to be included but others not so much? Well, I think any listener who has a dog or a cat knows that we connect with these animals and we love them. And the whole reason the Animal Welfare Act was put in place is because dogs were being stolen in the 60s from people's backyards and put into research facilities. And so early on, those animals were included. Also included are pigs and ferrets and non-human primates.

8:56So there are a number of species included, but the majority, the vast majority, are not in there. You attempted to talk to researchers. You wanted to tour facilities that were challenging to gain access to. Sometimes these labs were so tucked away, a community might not even be aware they were there. And you write about a large Beagle lab in Virginia called Inveagle. It largely operated in secret, and that facility has since shut down. But what was it like trying to get answers as you were researching this topic? Yeah, Jen, it was so frustrating. You know, sometimes I would go to a conference and talk to researchers or people at a pharmaceutical company, and we had great conversations, and they were open.

9:40And then I would follow up with them and their communications person would shut down the conversation. Or I'd try to reach out to a researcher to tour a lab because I really wanted to tell the story on both sides. This is a very controversial topic. And I felt like being able to talk to the researchers and see where they work and understand what they do would give me a better understanding of that side. And, you know, these are all the researchers I did talk to. They were caring and kind people, and they're working to make the world a better place. They want to find cures for diseases. But for the most part, the research community, even though they talk a lot about transparency, were not open to telling me their stories.

10:29Let's take a quick pause here. We'll be back with more of the conversation in just a moment.

10:38Let's get back to our discussion and add another voice. Kathleen Conley is the Vice President of Animal Research Issues at the Humane World for Animals, formerly known as the Humane Society. That's a global organization that works to protect animal welfare. Kathleen, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me. Kathleen, after graduating from college, you worked at a facility in South Carolina. It bred monkeys to be sold to research labs. What did you experience there? Yeah, that's correct. I worked at a facility that bred thousands of monkeys and learned really quickly. I went there because I wanted to advance human health and, of course, wanted the animals to be well cared for in the process.

11:18But over time, it just opened my eyes to how the animals were treated, you know, basically like a product, filling orders and sending monkeys out to laboratories across the country. And I just thought we need to do better for science and for the animals. Well, you sometimes received monkeys from labs as well. What did you notice about those animals? Yeah, it was really heartbreaking to see the animals who came to us after being used in laboratories. A lot of them self-biting, totally terrified of anything new in their cage, even just an apple, something that should be delicious. They were terrified of animals who had hair falling out for radiation experiments, bad teeth.

11:57It really was heartbreaking to think I sent animals into that situation. you know, just haunts me to this day. Well, the experiences you had made you become an advocate to work against animal research. At your organization, you hear from others who work in labs today. What kinds of stories do you hear? Really the same stories that were true when I was back in the lab in the 90s. And we have done undercover investigations, so I've seen directly with my own eyes what's happening in laboratories. I had visited laboratories earlier in my career as well, and really not enough has changed. So the technologies are really moving us away from using animals, but the treatment of the animals remains the same.

12:39They live in barren conditions, you know, are force-fed substances, and really do suffer in these laboratories. Melanie, through your reporting, you talked to a couple of people who are looking for alternatives to animal testing. What did you find? Well, there's some pretty cool things out there, and we've been talking about alternatives for decades now, but we now have organ chips that mimic the way organs work. For drug testing, we also have organoids. There's a lot of AI and computer modeling options. And from what I understand, these kind of work together. It's not just one thing that's replacing an animal.

13:15But I think the important thing to remember is that, and this administration has come out and said they want to invest more in alternatives. So they're talking about putting millions of dollars into these new methods, but we still have billions of dollars going into animal research. Well, has the technology reached a point where it can be scaled to replace animal testing? I don't know that it has yet, but we also need to invest more to make sure we can get to that point. We got this email from Michelle who says, I worked in animal research for nearly 40 years. What I do is make sure animal use is done humanely and correctly.

13:56Not only do humans benefit from animal research, but all of our pets do too. Vaccines that prevent veterinary diseases are also tested on animals, as are medications. Animal research is tightly controlled by laws and committees that oversee the protocols and projects. There is so much that goes on that the public doesn't understand. I'm proud of my contributions to keeping these animals safe and assure that personnel are properly trained and that laws are followed. Kathleen, how do you respond to researchers who say, we are not at a place where we have sufficient alternatives to animal testing, and it is our responsibility to do this testing, but do it in a way that is ethical and that protects animals as best we can?

14:37I'm sure that's an argument you hear quite often. Of course, the humane world for animals. We advocate for ultimate replacement of animals in laboratories. Until that day comes, we want to reduce the number of animals used and improve their conditions, but we should all really be focused on replacing the use of animals. And so I want to see everybody who wants to see that day happen, which I think everyone's in agreement, really working. We are at a turning point. These technologies, there are some that are developed. They're not being used after they are developed. So we want to see the use of those that have been developed.

15:12We want them accepted by federal agencies. And for those areas where we don't yet have those non-animal methods in place, we should be investing in them. You brought up infrastructure earlier. There's a really exciting announcement made recently by the National Institutes of Health to create an Oranoid Modeling Center. So an Oranoid is one of those approaches that we talked about, often used in combination with others. But we need the infrastructure. Our country has infrastructure built around using animals. So we need to start turning that investment into these non-animal approaches. Well, we heard from Dr.

15:47John Palowski from Boston about his efforts to move away from using dogs in education. At Harvard Medical School, I had the opportunity to replace the Beagle Dog Lab in physiology with a human patient simulated based scenarios that replicated many of the experiments that were done on the dogs, but instead were done in a human content with mannequins that could speak and also tell about their symptoms and respond to questions from the students. Thanks for that message. Kathleen, how hopeful are you that these alternatives will one day fully replace the need for animals? I am fully confident that will happen someday.

16:29We really are at a turning point. We have all these commitments from the government, industry wants to move away from using animals, the public at large, I think we have a lot going in our favor. I'm moving in this direction and we just need to continue to do so. And I think, you know, in the meantime, people who are trying to hold on to that old way of doing things, and I think the use of chimpanzees in the United States is a good example. We heard time and again, chimpanzees were absolutely necessary for biomedical research. We had a big campaign. they looked at the scientific need for chimpanzees and lo and behold, concluded they actually aren't necessary for research.

17:08So we want close scrutiny when animals are used. And in that case, it proves that they weren't. So we just want to see this continue. That's Kathleen Conley. She's the Vice President of Animal Research Issues at the Humane World for Animals, formerly known as the Humane Society. Kathleen, thanks for speaking with us. Thank you so much for having me. Melanie, when we talk about the use of animals, what scientific breakthroughs have resulted from animal studies? Well, going back to the 1600s, the first time that there was a successful blood transfusion, that was between dogs. So we have learned so much from animals.

17:45We've learned, we discovered insulin because of dog research. and I hope that the findings and the breakthroughs have been many because we have used hundreds of millions of animals over the years. But I think it's important to think about the opportunity cost because we also know that more than 90 % of the drugs tested on animals that are successful end up failing in human clinical trials. And so ethics aside, which is hard to do, just looking at the science and the humans that are suffering from diseases that don't have cures or treatments, how much are they missing out because we're putting so much resources into animals and not into something that has a better track record?

18:31And so when you talk about a better track record, are you talking about these alternative technologies that are emerging, or are you talking about experimentation on humans first? Well, we have laws about experimenting on humans, but we have so much data on humans now. We have multi-generational studies. We have sleep trackers. We have Apple watches that collect so much data. And so I'm talking about that as an alternative, as a different method of testing. Researchers came up with these principles called the three R's to try to make animal testing more humane. That's from a book that was published in 1959.

19:10Since then, advocates have pushed to expand that framework. What are some of the principles people are using now? So now people are talking a little bit more about looking at the value versus the harm. What is the cost benefit? And is there an upper limit to that harm, an upper limit to what can be done to these animals? And also just looking at, you know, does an alternative exist? And if it exists, maybe that has to be used. The three R's of animal research are replacement, reduction, and refinement. What did those just sort of pull the thread there? What do those actually mean in practice? So replacement means using something else besides an animal.

19:53Reduction means using fewer animals. If you've got a study, for example, pesticides used to be tested on dogs for a full year, and now they're just tested for 90 days. So that's a shorter term, probably fewer animals. And then refinement means that maybe their pain is lessened or they're doing something called enrichment. Maybe they're taking the dogs to play in the hallway or they're giving pigs a little maze to sniff through to find treats. So they're having a slightly better life in the lab than they would otherwise. Let's head to a quick break. So to come, we hear from a former researcher who says animal and dog testing is still necessary for medical advancement.

20:36We'll be right back.

20:42Let's get back to the conversation and bring in Naomi Harlambakis. She is a doctorate in anatomical sciences and neurobiology. She's the director of communications and science policy at Americans for Medical Progress. That's an organization that educates the public on the role of animal studies in science. Naomi, welcome to the program. Hi, thanks so much for having me. So animal testing has been around for thousands of years. Even Aristotle experimented on live animals. Why have scientists been turning to animals in medical research for as long as we can remember? Yeah, no, that's a great question.

21:15And I think it's one we all often think about when we talk about this topic. I don't think it's a question of do we use animals or not animals. It's how do we protect both people and animals while figuring out safe medicines and devices and getting them out to protect public health? And what tools do we need to get there? And so even though dogs today make up a very small share of regulated research in the U.S., it is trending downward. And when alternatives can answer the question, we use them. where they can't yet in certain areas. Dogs are sometimes the most scientifically relevant non-rodent species to make sure that those first in-human trials are as safe as possible.

21:58You used to work in a lab that used mice and you got into science policy and the work you're doing now because you noticed a pushback on working with animals. What do you think are some of the biggest misconceptions about animal testing? Yeah, I think people often think that people that work with animals don't care about the animals, that they don't have that level of compassion and the love for the animals that really drives them every day. But these are some of the most loving, compassionate, caring people that I've ever interacted with from graduate school up until now, where I work with them on a daily basis.

22:32And then at the same time, there is a misconception that we don't want to reduce the numbers and make this as safe and comfortable as possible to create better science. So two things can be true at the same time. I think we can celebrate progress toward these non-animal methods. It's very exciting, but we can also, also champion compassion, transparency, accountability whenever animals are needed to be used. We got this email from Sasha who says, I am an animal lover and veterinary technician. I have been an animal care technician for over a decade. People aren't aware that there are so many protocols in place to protect the animals in our care.

23:10Unfortunately, a lot of research still relies on animal models, but whenever possible, we strive to use other options. I can assure you the animals in my care are honestly better taken care of than some people's pets. I've cried over animals I've worked with. It's not an easy job. You get attached. Melanie, what was your experience in talking to researchers about the relationships or the feelings they shaped towards the animals that they were doing research on? Well, I completely agree with Naomi that they are compassionate and caring people, but I'm talking about the lab techs and the people that interact with the animals every day.

23:50In my experience and the researchers that I talked to or who've researched in the past, they were so far removed from the animals because they were spending their time, they told me, trying to get grants and they were on their computers and they were not interacting with the animals. So it's really at a different level. The researchers who are making the decisions are not interacting with the animals as much as we might expect. Naomi, we mentioned scientists are working on alternatives to animal testing. How likely do you think it is that we'll see a future where animal testing is no longer required at all?

24:23You know, it's hard to put a time stamp on those things, but I think that day is very possible. And I think, you know, the way that, you know, there is this momentum towards this and there's these investments going toward it, I think that's very possible in the future. We got this email from Ken that I think gets at the heart of some of this tension. He says, years ago, I worked in an independent testing laboratory that conducted studies in lab animals for commercial clients. In my mind, the error in extrapolating findings from lab animals to human beings far exceeds the significant differences between control and test groups of animals.

24:56Unfortunately, I don't see any non-animal models out there that give us any better indication of the safety and health benefits of the synthetic chemicals and drugs that we expose ourselves to. Melanie, does that echo some of what you've heard from researchers as you were working on this book? It does in that a lot of the animals do not translate to humans. I mean, they have different lifespans. They have some different systems in their bodies. and yet we are not there where we can just say, okay, tomorrow, all the animals out of the labs. But we do need a transition. I haven't heard, even though the new administration is supporting putting more resources in these other methods, I haven't heard about a transition plan to really reduce the numbers of animals, know how many we're starting out with, what's the goal, and how we're going to put more money into these new innovations.