The US experiments on tens of thousands of beagles. After a shocking case, will it come to an end?

Animal rights advocates often contrast humanity’s dismal treatment of animals farmed for food with our adoration bordering on worship of pet cats and dogs — the point being that these distinctions between animals that are equally sentient are arbitrary, hypocritical, and pointlessly cruel.

The comparison makes an important point, but it also conceals a grimmer reality: Humans treat the animals that we categorize as beloved companions horribly, too, breeding millions of them in puppy mills and even experimenting on tens of thousands of them every year in labs. And that in turn reveals something more fundamental about our relationship to animals. Whether they’re chickens, pigs, or dogs, the problem is the same: Nonhuman animals are commodities with no rights and few legal limits on what can be done to them.

Nevertheless, because of their relatively privileged position in human society, lab experimentation on dogs has attracted intense scrutiny in recent years. In 2022, the Virginia-based beagle breeder Envigo, which was one of the top suppliers of dogs for lab research in the country — essentially a factory farm for lab animals — shut down under pressure from a Department of Justice probe alleging that the company was grossly mistreating its dogs, even by the minimal standards set by the Animal Welfare Act (AWA).

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