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9 Beagles Rescued from Laboratory After Spending Their Entire Lives Trapped in Cages

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Dogs are excellent creatures. They are friends, teachers, and comic relief.

There are plenty of people in this world who prefer the company of dogs to that of other people. Dogs don’t say much (though some are quite talkative), but they also offer a listening ear and quiet moral support.

It’s terrible, then, when people take advantage of those same traits that make them lovable companions.



Beagles are an easy-going breed of dog. They’re not too big, and they’re good-natured and friendly, which is what makes them a common household pet.

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It also makes them an excellent test subject for laboratories.

Beagles are commonly used for testing because of their patient demeanor. Their one pitfall — their loud barking and baying — is easily “remedied” by cutting their vocal cords, leaving the otherwise chatty canines voiceless.

You’re probably aware that animals are used for testing, but maybe you haven’t heard a lot about these beagles. There’s a reason for that, too: most of them are euthanized after the labs are done testing a product on them.

Melanie Kaplan, a woman who owns a beagle rescued from a lab, says that there’s a more nefarious reason for why more people don’t adopt former lab test subjects.

“From what I understand, the laboratories euthanize the dogs because they say they wouldn’t make good pets because they haven’t been socialized, or because of the testing that has been performed on them. The reality is that having dogs adopted just makes the public more aware — and naturally, the labs want to avoid publicity,” Kaplan said.

In the batch of dogs that her pup, Alexander Hamilton, came from, it was impossible to tell exactly what they had suffered.

“I don’t know the tests that these dogs underwent, but there are some visible signs of their treatment,” Kaplan said. “One had a sore by his eye, one had a broken tail that didn’t heal correctly, and Hamilton’s vet said it looked like he had an old leg injury.”



As numerous agencies work toward banning these cruel practices, others work to get dogs out of labs and into homes. One group, the Beagle Freedom Project, rescued a batch of beagles from a Las Vegas laboratory.

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They filmed the process of unloading the beagles so they could experience sunshine and grass for the first time in their lives.

Before, the dogs were merely identified by the numbers they’d been assigned, which were tattooed onto the inside of their ear. The first thing rescuers did was give them all new names.



Then they carried the terrified animals one by one to a backyard where they could behave like regular dogs after spending every day in a crate.

The beagles sniffed grass and ran around and played with each other, but they were still very wary of any human contact. After they’d enjoyed their freedom a bit, some of them found a wooden shelter to hide in (since cages were all they had known, an enclosed space still felt “safe” to them).

Fortunately, it is possible to rehabilitate these animals. It takes time, trust, and a lot of love, but these beagles can live full lives and forget their traumatic pasts thanks to people like those with The Beagle Freedom Project.

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