New Exposé: 360 Beagle Puppies Bred for Experiments Found Dead at International Breeding Mill
New Exposé: 360 Beagle Puppies Bred for Experiments Found Dead at International Breeding Mill
Authorities Investigate Envigo: Dead and Dying Dogs, Some Left to Rot, Nursing Mother Dogs Deprived of Food for Days
London – A new PETA US undercover investigation into Envigo, an international supplier of beagles to laboratories for use in experiments, has documented that workers with no veterinary credentials stuck needles into puppies’ heads; injected euthanasia drugs directly into puppies’ hearts without sedation, causing them immense pain; deprived nursing mother dogs of food for up to two days; sprayed dogs with high-pressure hoses, leaving them drenched; and caused them to suffer in other ways.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has just completed a multiday inspection and opened an investigation into the facility after a mill supervisor was caught on video describing USDA inspectors’ concerns as “a damn game you gotta play to … satisfy ’em, because of the bull**** that they can make happen”. Photos from the PETA US investigation are available here, and video footage is available here. Photos and video are also available via WeTransfer here and here.
Envigo confines some 5,000 beagles to barren kennels and cramped cages in football field–sized sheds, forces the mothers to breed twice a year for up to seven years, and produces around 500 puppies each month to sell for experimentation. Here are some of the investigator’s findings:
- A supervisor and a worker withheld food from nursing mother dogs for days and continued to do so even after the USDA directed the staff not to – and then told workers to lie about it if asked.
- Workers with no veterinary credentials stuck needles into puppies’ heads, apparently to drain hematomas, without any pain relief, causing the puppies to scream. They also cut prolapsed tissue off puppies’ eyes with scissors, among other medical procedures.
- The PETA US investigator found more than 360 dead puppies in the course of the investigation. Some had been crushed by their mothers in the cramped cages that they were forced to live in, others died of pneumonia or hepatitis, and some had been left to rot alongside their surviving siblings.
- Workers and a supervisor routinely left dogs in their cages as they sprayed them with high-pressure hoses, leaving the soaked puppies to shiver on the hard plastic floors and their food to grow mouldy and become infested with maggots. Puppies also fell through holes in the cages and ended up in drains, soaked with water, faeces, and other waste.
“If the puppies at Envigo survive the trauma of being born into a barren cage, blasted with a high-pressure hose, and the painful procedures they’re subjected to, more horrors await them at the laboratories they’re sold to,” says PETA Vice President of International Programmes Mimi Bekhechi. “These dogs are no different to the dogs who share our homes, and yet if anyone not wearing a white lab coat did to their dog what experimenters are doing to these beagles, they’d rightly be put behind bars.”
Envigo also owns facilities in the UK where animals may be bred for and used in experiments – including in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire. PETA is urging the government to embrace its groundbreaking
PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow the group on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
Contact:
Jennifer White +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]
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