[Animals] Beagles are in the news after decades as key players in medical research

[FazzNoth]

Beagles are in the news. Last fall, Republican politicians, including Rep. Madison Cawthorn (N.C.), attacked Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, by seeking to tie him to supposedly torturous experiments involving the breed. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) posted a photo on Twitter of former president Donald Trump holding a beagle with the disconcerting caption, “Beagle Lives Matter.” Then, more recently, 4,000 beagle dogs were released from the facilities of contract research company Envigo after investigations found violations of federal animal welfare regulations. There is probably one available now at your local animal rescue, which will surely receive more attention now that Prince Harry and Meghan adopted one of them.

 

Much of the recent attention has been driven by activist organizations seeking to make the cute little hounds into icons of animal experimentation, to undermine public support for federal spending on animal research. But, the beagle news also raises the question: Why are beagles used for experimentation?

Humans and dogs, as any pet owner will tell you, are extremely alike. Many of our basic biological systems are similar: Dogs get cancers like ours and respond to some pharmaceuticals like we do. Beagles, a medium-sized and friendly breed, are easy to work with and cheap to feed, making them useful laboratory animals. But the full answer requires a longer historical view.

 

In the first decades of the 20th century, scientists began to worry about the reliability of their laboratory animals. Dogs had long been used for experiments, especially in cardiology and physiology, because their circulatory systems are parallel to ours. But the dogs that researchers had access to were neither consistent nor even always healthy. Strays were often picked up in fields or purchased from city pounds, and scientists rarely knew exactly what they were getting. What was needed, they argued, was a “standard” or “normal” dog.

There were a number of candidates. Researchers at Columbia University proposed the Irish terrier in the 1930s, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration briefly bred the dogs for toxicity testing. But terriers didn’t stick their small beards required tiresome maintenance, and advocates failed to assemble funding for a centralized terrier colony. Others proposed airedales or beagles, yet there were few decisive arguments favoring one above the rest. Scientists typically recommended breeds they knew best, generating a stew of competing personal preferences.

 

Outside of the walls of the laboratory, however, American dog culture was changing and altering the fates of many breeds. Beagles were always common dogs, ever since their importation from England in the late 19th century, but they experienced a steady climb in po[CENSORED]rity as dog ownership exploded in the 1930s and ’40s. In 1950, Americans fell in love with Snoopy, a new beagle character in the Peanuts comic. Four years later, the American Kennel Club listed it as the most po[CENSORED]r breed in the country.

Such po[CENSORED]rity extended into science as well. In 1950, the Atomic Energy Commission launched the most expansive beagle study ever conducted in a multi-sited investigation into radiation and longevity, occasioned by the U.S. detonation of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Short-term radiation effects were clear and horrific, but long-term consequences from lower doses were less obvious. Because rats tended to die of pneumonia before they developed cancers, a bigger and longer-living test animal was needed.

America’s nuclear scientists settled on the dog and chose beagles, which were bred in most states and thus easy to purchase. From 1950 until the early 1980s, large-scale beagle radiobiology studies were conducted across the country: at the University of California at Davis, the University of Utah, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Rochester and more. The foundations of much of what we know about the health effects of radiation lie in this work.

But so does much of what we know about beagles and dogs more broadly. As it turned out, little basic data about canine health even existed in 1950. American veterinarians were only just starting to focus on domestic pets, rather than agricultural animals. The majority of privately owned dogs died young hit by cars or felled by undiagnosed health issues.

 

So along with studying radiation, researchers such as Allen C. Andersen, at Davis, set out to answer key questions, such as: How long can a beagle live? (More than 17 years.) How many dogs should live together in cages? (Two seemed to be the sweet spot.) What were their nutritional requirements? Their psychological needs? Supported by the new Research Laboratory for the Diseases of Dogs at Cornell University, these researchers generated huge quantities of information about beagles, culminating in the publication of Andersen’s “The Beagle as an Experimental Dog” in 1970.

But radiobiologists weren’t alone. Pharmaceutical researchers and the FDA also began prominently favoring beagles. The FDA’s toxicity testing guidelines from 1955 noted that the agency used beagles for internal appraisals but stopped short of formally endorsing the breed. That changed in the early 1960s after researchers realized that thalidomide, a po[CENSORED]r morning sickness medication used by pregnant women, could cause serious birth defects in their children. These revelations convinced legislators and regulators of the need for stronger drug testing standards. The result was the 1962 Kefauver-Harris Amendment to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which required demonstrations of drug efficacy and established the framework for today’s “gold standard” of random clinical trials. It also forced the FDA to explicitly advise companies on how to test drugs, including using dogs (or monkeys) as the step between rodent tests and human trials. Arnold Lehman, director of the FDA’s Division of Pharmacology, clarified in 1963 that when the FDA said “dog,” it basically meant “beagle.”

 

Because the large American market was increasingly key to the success of drugs anywhere, regulators around the world mirrored the FDA’s beagle recommendation, and pharmaceutical companies from Germany to Japan established their own colonies of charming little black and tan hounds. Today, there are for-profit scientific beagle breeders in the United States, England, Japan, China and more.

This history reminds us how much we owe to these dogs, countless thousands who have lived, howled and often suffered for science. Their sacrifices helped unveil secrets of the atom, demonstrate that cigarettes cause cancer, reveal new techniques for periodontal surgery and much more. We also know more about dogs and how to care for them. Many vaccines, including for rabies, parvo and canine hepatitis, relied on beagle research. So too did modern canine nutritional guidelines and medications such as Anipryl, which treats Alzheimer’s-like conditions in dogs. Our understanding of how dogs live was fundamentally transformed thanks to beagles.

But today, a science without beagles appears increasingly likely. Many I spoke with during the course of my research for a book on the history of the use of beagles in scientific research, especially within activist communities, predict an end to their use within one or two decades. Whether they are correct remains to be seen, but understanding our debt to beagles and their role in over a century of scientific discovery is as vital as ever.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/opinions-beagles-are-in-the-news-after-decades-as-key-players-in-medical-research/ar-AA117xl8