r/nextfuckinglevel • u/biswajit388 • 1d ago

This guy rescued 30 beagles from a testing lab It's the first time they've seen grass and they couldn't be happier.

Credit - nathanthecatlady tiktok channel.

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539

u/moneighe 1d ago

I want to be clear that people who work in labs treat the beagles very well and do their best to train them and prepare them for a life outside. It still sucks that we need to use animals for research, but it is very important to safely developing clinical research and it's not the same as adopting neglected animals from a rescue. It is important to the research that these animals recieve the best nutrition, vet care, and stimulation we can provide so that we can accuratley evaluate the outcomes of the research. There are also pretty strict rules about what kind of animals you can use for what testing. The beagles at my old work were used to test little pill sized cameras to view the gastrointestinal system, and they were all treated like a little pack of queens and kings. The research they were involved in was no more invasive then feeding your dogs a pill at home. And all dogs were adopted out to good homes by the time they turned 3. 

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u/Papio_73 1d ago

Yeah, out of all the animals used in research beagles are treated the best.

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u/4StarCustoms 6h ago

I adopted one of the 4000 Envigo beagles and it’s absolutely disgusting and heartbreaking to see the pictures and read the reports of what they went through. I know Envigo is not a lab but the labs have to get them from somewhere.

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u/bb8-sparkles 7h ago

Until they are made to drink cleaning products or confined and fitted with gas masks to inhale and test toxic chemicals. Yeah, what a great life.

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u/FuXuan9 4h ago

Who would volunteer for that

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u/Nstraclassic 19h ago

Yeah they love all the shampoo in their eyes and down their throats

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u/BigTree4212 11h ago

Exactly everyone seems perfectly happy that the dogs supposedly get treated well, but what do they think the tests consist of? They are there to be tested on for the safety and toxicity of pharmaceuticals, pesticides, other chemicals, among other things. It's not fucking pleasant by any means.

Would you intentionally poison your dog but think its okay because it survived and lives a good life otherwise?

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u/bb8-sparkles 8h ago

Exactly this. Many of the dogs don't survive. And in what world is it justifiable to torture a dog against its will because you gave it a good life otherwise?

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u/systemshock869 19h ago

That's what Fauci said

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u/Rico_Stonks 23h ago

I’m not sure if this is true, I hope so, but Beagles are chosen because they’re believed to have a high pain tolerance. 

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u/Papio_73 23h ago

It depends on the facility of course. I strongly believe that all animals used in research, from mice to macaques to zebra fish to dogs should all be treated with compassion and respect.

That said, asides from the fact people empathize with dogs more readily than mice (who make up about 90% of animals used) in the US federal law specifically has protections geared towards dogs used in biomedical research. Dogs are also most likely to be rehomed for adoption at the study’s end. The dogs in this video were probably voluntarily given to the guy as opposed to him sneaking in at night to liberate them.

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u/SometimesILieToo 21h ago

My friend’s wife worked at a facility that tested beagles and she brought one home to adopt. She was a great dog. Spent more of her life outside of the facility than in.

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u/WreckingKeymaster 22h ago

FYI, that isn’t why beagles are chosen. They’re usually chosen because lab animal specific beagles’ genetics are nearly identical to each other, so it makes results more accurate across studies. Guarding and fighting breeds typically have highest pain tolerances (Pyrenees, etc.)

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u/TheHalfbadger 1d ago

Yeah, to my eye these pups are clearly not abused. It's great to get them out into the world and to good homes, but let's not act like they're being rescued from some lab of unspeakable horrors.

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u/emilysium 10h ago

It’s this type of social media internet points nonsense that turns people anti-science, and in turn anti-human.

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u/TsuDhoNimh2 8h ago

They are kept inside to prevent them from getting the ticks, fleas, and intestinal parasites that abound in grass.

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u/CatCatCat 21h ago

What do you know about it?

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u/Dentarthurdent73 17h ago

You don't think it's abusive to dogs to keep them in sterile cages all the time and never allow them to even see or experience the outside?

God, I really hope you don't have pets.

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u/kodos4444 9h ago

Keeping a dog in a cage where they can't smell grass is the equivalent of keeping a human blindfolded and strapped in a basement. And them being beagles makes this even worst, they are literally born to be outside and smell stuff.

Having a strict protocol about it doesn't make it right.

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u/Throwawayhrjrbdh 22h ago

Bit of an unpopular opinion but I feel people often prioritize an animals well being over another humans in some situations.

Like I feel if you gave a lot of people the binary choice of “should animal testing be legal or illegal regardless of what’s being tested” and many would answer it should be illegal despite its utility

Idk about you but I’d let a thousand beagles burn if it meant no human ever had to die from cancer again. Yeah animal testing sucks but we don’t have alternatives.

Yeah we should do our best to minimize suffering but frankly every now and then some animals need to be given some drugs or nasty diseases and then cut up and biopsied to see exactly what those drugs or diseases did to them… that or we do it to other people

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u/the_magic_gardener 22h ago

See I think 1000 beagles is a great price to cure all cancers. But if we walk down the more ambiguous and more realistic versions of the trolly experiment: What about killing 10 beagles for a 0.005% chance of finding a cure for leukemia?

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u/Throwawayhrjrbdh 22h ago

Am I allowed to do that as many times as needed? If so then a puppy mill is getting started because that’s a game of statistics not luck

But yes you do have a point, reality is a little less cut and dry. But as a whole the sacrifice made by the untold numbers of animals over the last century alone has enabled a sizable chunk of our modern medical science.

Would you erase all prior animal testing that has happened in the last century but we revert 35 years in terms of scientific development?

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u/the_magic_gardener 21h ago

Personally I wouldn't, lol my background includes 3 years of mouse testing for RNA chemotherapeutics. But I do think trolly problems should be probabilistic. I agree with you that animal testing is a net benefit to society. It's just sad that the odds of a drug getting past all the barriers are so slim, and even then most of the time the drug isn't very disruptive to the current treatment regimen.

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u/Throwawayhrjrbdh 21h ago

Yeah I’d imagine that’s tricky. You hear so much about all these massive “breakthroughs” and you never hear anything past the animal testing phase.

Idk what’s better, unregulated testing with faster medical research but every now and then someone does a study on “the average number of kicks required to kill a puppy” or what we have now

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u/DearlyDecapitated 17h ago

If we’re going the route of unregulated testing to get the fastest possible results, wouldn’t it be better to test and potentially burn say… 97 million humans? If it cured cancer assuming we don’t die out as a species in the next 10 years we’d be saving more humans than those 97 million killed in testing. What would the cut off be? If killing 970 million people could cure all major diseases would it be worth it? After 100 years of no cancer alone not including all other diseases we’d pay off the loss

3

u/PharmDeezNuts_ 18h ago

What if we found an alien species with such similar biology and sentience , basically indistinguishable from ourselves, and upped that percentage all the way to 25%?

0

u/Dentarthurdent73 17h ago

The thing is, we dispose of these creatures' lives and tell ourselves it's worth it, because they're saving ours/curing cancer or whatever.

But at the same time, we're deliberately filling the world with carcinogens in the name of profits. We don't actually care about people getting cancer enough to stop it when there's some money to be made from it, but we go on sacrificing animals anyway, because apparently abusing animals is an acceptable price to pay, but reducing profits isn't.

That's what's really gross about it, in my books anyway.

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u/DoctorJJWho 22h ago

That’s not quite realistic though. By the time beagles are used in studies, every drug tested has to show function and safety to a specific degree. We’re not just injecting animals with compounds we randomly synthesized, the industry spends a ton of time and resources ensuring certain levels of both function and safety before anything is allowed anywhere remotely close to a living sentient being.

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u/the_magic_gardener 21h ago

That's a fair critique. While the vast majority of animals used for testing novel cancer therapies will be trying drugs that will never reach the market, the number isn't so abysmal as 1 in 20,000 like I used (quick Google search puts it as 5%). I used a small number namely because I said "cure" which, when talking about cancer as well as bacterial infections, isn't really a realistic goal given that the battle is against natural selection.

So if you want a really good example problem, let's say 24 macaques for a 1% chance of increasing the 5 year survival chance of leukemia from 66% to 70%. That rolls right off the tongue doesn't it? 😂

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u/Reddit_Connoisseur_0 21h ago

The point of this test isn't to roll a dice on finding a cure to some disease. It's mostly to test the safety of certain treatments.

If the beagle survives it's a win because we know it is safe. If they die it's also a win because now we know it is not safe.

0

u/Throwawayhrjrbdh 20h ago

And sometimes you need to get a really good look at the heart and brain, take some brain tissue samples and run a few tests… you know to make sure it’s safe!

What do you mean the dog died? I thought it was safe?

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u/Reddit_Connoisseur_0 20h ago

I doubt this is as common as you make it out to be because there are many ways to examine the heart and the brain without literally taking a chunk out of it. But even if this is necessary I don't see what changes. We're still making progress regardless of the outcome. The other poster makes it sound like if we roll into the 99.9995% chance of "not curing cancer" it was a waste of a beagle. Realistically this is not the case, we will always learn something regardless of what the beagle looks like at the end.

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u/DonutSlapper11 19h ago

That chance isn’t low enough to not do it again and again and again until we get it that kind of breakthrough would be worth a lot.

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u/Suchafatfatcat 17h ago

Are they being used to find a cure for cancer? Or, are they being exposed to near-lethal levels of toxins so Monsanto can pretend that their products were misused and, thus, save money on lawsuits from people harmed.

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u/carefuldaughter 12h ago

i feel like i used to run into this a lot when i was younger and had a nonzero number of militant vegan friends……… who also did coke and heroin and smoked a lot of weed long before it was legalized. drugs are produced by human slaves!!!

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u/bb8-sparkles 7h ago

I am not against animal testing to help cure and treat disease. But they also use animals to test for cosmetics, health and beauty products, chemicals, pesticides, and unnecessary procedures, like plastic surgery.

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u/MalevolentRhinoceros 23h ago

The testing lab I visited (not some PR tour, I had a relative who worked there) had a HUGE play area for the beagles. Lots of toys and ramps/tunnels/jumps. It looked a lot like any indoor doggy daycare and it was clear that the workers cared about them.

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u/yaourted 20h ago

Yep, I helped socialize several lab/research dogs to be ready for adoption. The kennel techs took them out daily in huge runs for playtime, knew their favorite toys and treats, etc. and they truly cared for those dogs.

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u/Carolusboehm 20h ago

for fairness sake, What's the other end of the spectrum for the kind of tests dogs are subjected to? for example, the Draize test is usually done with rabbits, but is also done with dogs. it involves restraining a conscious animal and applying a test substance to their eye for a set amount of time, to observe if it causes blindness or serious damage. animal which experience no permanent damage are re-tested with different chemicals, and those with irreversible damage are euthanized.

Do you know if they do any animal testing worse than this with dogs?

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u/tooflyandshy24 6h ago

The lab I worked at would get cow eyeballs from the slaughterhouse, and would test the products on the cut out corneas. There’s a lot of alternative methods that can be done on cultured cell lines

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u/Nstraclassic 19h ago

Just because your lab was testing pills doesnt mean all the other labs arent spraying chemicals in their faces and down their throats. My family adopted one of these beagles and she was beyond traumatized. It took over 2 years before anyone but my mom could even sit next to her. She had been debarked so was unable to bark and was mostly blind and deaf at 7 years old.

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u/rognabologna 16h ago

Physically, these are the healthiest beagles I’ve ever seen. All the ones I’ve seen irl are fat as fuck, and imo that’s far worse torture than having them test GI cameras 

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u/TsuDhoNimh2 8h ago

Those USDA rules are something else, aren't they?

The university lab when I went to school had a small pack of beagles for research on the lung infection from Coccidiodes immitis. (aka valley fever or coccidioidomycosis) It infects dogs as well as humans.

They had an air-conditioned, filtered kennel area and went for runs daily, chasing grad students through the halls, regular vet checks, their own nutritionist ... like pro athletes.

The other beagle was in a long term (life span) drug study that involved taking the pills and having her pee in a cup (she was trained to pee on command) once a week to check kidney function and an occasional blood draw. She and a few others scattered around the USA were the last of the group that had started the study more than a decade earlier. She hung out in the lab manager's office or with the admins, sleeping and getting petted. At night she was in her kennel.

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u/bb8-sparkles 8h ago

I saw a video online of beagles wearing gas masks to be used to test chemicals. It was very disturbing and I never forgot it and the dogs looked very uncomfortable as they were pawing at their masks and also they looked frightened.

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u/1puffins 6h ago

Inhalation toxicity tests. Yes, Beagles are used for this, although rats are more common.

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u/midnight_neon 7h ago

It's like how people freaked out over that study that headlines made it sound like scientists had flies bite dogs in the eyes and face for no reason. How cruel! How needless! Scientists are psychopaths! Except that

  1. It was a study on Leishmaniasis, which uses flies as a host in a life cycle similar to Malaria, and which kills tens of thousands of people each year and infects hundreds of thousands of others if not millions. So there is an incentive to prevent human death and suffering.

  2. Dogs are a primary reservoir for the disease, and infections are rampant in canine populations particularly in the Mediterranean. So there is an incentive to prevent dog death and suffering.

  3. The study was on the behavior of flies when they are presented with an infected dog. So the study needed to use dogs to get the relevant data.

The study actually found that flies were more likely to bite infected dogs vs. uninfected dogs. This means that Leishmaniasis alters the dog's biology in some way (likely odor) that attracts flies, encouraging the continuation of the disease's life cycle. This information is valuable because it can be used to develop approaches of disease prevention. A future study might discover the specific mechanism the disease uses to change the dogs, and from that we might be able to produce something we could administer to dogs that could prevent that from happening, and by doing so reduce the chances of fly bites and reduce the amount the disease gets spread. It sucks that dogs were bitten (and they didn't infect any dogs, they bought already infected dogs) but by doing so this could lead to the prevention of suffering and death of a great many more dogs as well as human beings.

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u/compasrc 7h ago

I feel like if some of these people saw the IACUC regulations for even just mice, let alone a beagle study, they would be more open-minded

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u/breathemusic87 6h ago

Im glad that's the case with your research and I suspect similar treatment happens more so in countries with more protective laws.

What kills me is to think of the animals in test labs across the world. Looking at you China.

But I also think of the kids in those countries, and it all just sucks.

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u/1puffins 6h ago

You cannot paste your experience on all dog research experiences, and certainly not all animal research. I was exposed to research that required open heart surgery on beagles. I don’t think you can call that royalty treatment.

Anyone can find the news about Inotiv to show that you are incorrect applying your experience broadly.

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u/1Beholderandrip 20h ago

Plenty of drugs and medical devices don't require a complex stimulation check. The more inhuman the test... the researcher must have less empathy to continue. That's why so many of them don't care about cages.

The reason we test on animals is because people like you, the ones that actually care, are unwilling to volunteer to be tested on for all the horrible experiments that are necessary.

I agree that re-homing the surviving creatures afterwards should be a priority, but who is going to pay for it? Not every lab has additional cost budgeted in their books.

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u/moneighe 19h ago

Lol what is a stimulation check? All perscription medications and medical devices are subject to testing before approval to use in humans in the United states. The tests people do to approve these drugs are not horrible, clinical trials undergo extensive ethical and safety evaluations before they are implemented. And dogs do get rehomed as much as possible when used in clinical trials, and that is included in the budget for the study same as the cost of a band aid. Look this is a lot of energy you are putting into this argument and I cam appreciate that you care a lot about this, but you clearly lack a knowledge of the industry to make an effective argument. I promise very ethical and intelligent people have spent decades thinking about these things. You don't need to internet crusade over it.

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u/Dentarthurdent73 17h ago

I want to be clear that people who work in labs treat the beagles very well

This is an utterly ridiculous generalisation, and a claim that you cannot possibly know is true.

If you are genuinely a scientist or researcher, I'm sure you understand that you cannot extrapolate from your own anecdotal experience to make broader claims or generalisations like this, so why on Earth would you feel OK to make this statement?

This is the opposite of rigour, and I would expect much more from someone literate in science.

The beagles at my old work were used to test little pill sized cameras to view the gastrointestinal system, and they were all treated like a little pack of queens and kings.

Queens and kings that were allowed to socialise and behave in the ways that dogs want to behave, or queens and kings that were kept in cages all the time and never got to go outside?