Beagles, Monkeys From Testing Lab Find Freedom

A group of beagles and and of monkeys recently got their first taste of freedom, as they were rescued from an animal-testing facility after it went out of business.

AniClin Preclinical Services in Oxford, N.J., closed a few months ago, leaving 120 beagles and 55 macaque monkeys behind.

AniClin's parent company, Azopharma, went into bankruptcy on Good Friday, April 2 and the building housing these animals was locked up with a sign posted for employees not to return.

Advocacy group Win Animal Rights succeeded in getting the animals released.

According to a former employee, only one of the beagles had been used for testing. But all lived the lives of property, not of dogs.

Day after day, month after month, year after year, they were confined to plexiglass crates, fed and watered on precise schedules, kept clean. But with no opportunity to leave their solitary little boxes and spend time with others like themselves, the 118 beagles — lab dogs used to test drugs and chemicals — displayed nothing of the much-acclaimed breed's characteristics: joyful, noisy and curious.

As you can see in this video, the dogs were unaccustomed to grass.



Freedom (pictured top-right), one of the rescued dogs, even attended this year's Animal Rights Conference this past weekend in Arlington, Va.

Animal-rights group In Defense of Animals helped transport the 55 macaque monkeys to sanctuaries in Oklahoma and Texas. IDA is now led by Scotlund Haisley, who oversaw animal-rescue teams for The Humane Society of the United States.

We don't know what exactly they were doing to the monkeys. We do know that the monkeys, who are 4 – 6 years old, were, according to the lab, being held in individual housing, isolated from each other. Some enclosures even faced the wall at one point, so they couldn't even see other monkeys – just one of numerous violations of the Animal Welfare Act cited by the USDA that attest to the anguish these monkeys endured in the lab, including psychological suffering so severe that some were pulling hair out from their chest, shoulders and forearms.

I hope that events like this create more awareness about the victims of vivisection -- like animal agribusiness, an industry that exists behind closed doors.

While sensitive animals are imprisoned and tortured, people like animal experimenter J. David Jentsch become wealthy. Jentsch is a professor of behavioral neuroscience and an animal experimenter at UCLA. He also created the pro-animal-testing organization Pro-Test for Science, which has been called "a publicity stunt aimed at preserving researchers' federal funding and turning public attention from the nature of the researcher's own work, which involves addicting monkeys to methamphetamine."

In May Jentsch bought a house for $1.029 million in Sherman Oaks, Calif. He sold his previous home, which he had purchased for $670,000 in December 2007, to the Regents of the University of California.

Anti-Vivisection Protesters' Indictment Thrown Out

On a related note, a judge last week dismissed the indictment against four protesters charged under the Animal Rights Terrorism Act for a series of protests in California against animal experimentation.

Judge Ronald M. Whyte ruled that the government's indictment against the AETA 4 didn't specify what crimes the four were alleged to have committed.

In order for an indictment to fulfill its constitutional purposes, it must allege facts that sufficiently inform each defendant of what it is that he or she is alleged to have done that constitutes a crime. This is particularly important where the species of behavior in question spans a wide spectrum from criminal conduct to constitutionally protected political protest.

The government has the option to re-indict the four.


(Photo of Freedom courtesy of OnePlanetOnePerson.com.)