Animal Ethos. Lesley A. Sharp
and there was used to fill some scientists’ very real need for experimental animals” (44–45).
As noted by USDA welfare staff writers today, Life and Sports Illustrated successfully alerted the public to a predatory trade in snatched pets that fed the needs of laboratory research (Adams and Larson 2016). Indeed, as several members of Congress reported, letters from constituents expressing outrage after reading these articles outnumbered those protesting U.S. involvement in Vietnam (Stevens 1990). Together, they generated a groundswell of support behind a campaign for lab animal welfare reform. Representative Resnick, alongside Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania, sponsored bills in each house of Congress that required the licensing of animal dealers and the labs with which they worked by the USDA, which was also empowered to conduct on-site inspections of both (Adams and Larson 2016).
Needless to say, opposition to the proposed legislation arose in some quarters of laboratory science. Phinizy summarized the arguments as follows: “1) it would hamper research, 2) it was playing into the hands of antivivisectionists [the contemporary term for animal rights activists] and 3) it was unworkable, unconstitutional and discriminatory, since in its original form it legislated only against dealers who sold to laboratories” (1965, 41). One pro-science lobbyist, Dr. Robert Estep, asserted that reports of dog-napping were far exaggerated from the actual numbers and, thus, did not warrant reform, to which Phinizy shot back that if such logic were applied to the Lindbergh kidnapping—that “there are really very few children stolen annually”—there would be no need to seek stricter punishments for those who abduct children. Phinizy defended the legislation by underscoring the affective power and social worth assigned to dogs in American society, arguing that “what Dr. Estep seems to overlook is the further fact that, almost as much as a child, the domestic dog is part of the human heart and the human home and has been since lost time, for reasons no one can or need explain” (1965, 41–42). The affective dimensions of Phinizy’s essay are evident, too, in a sheriff’s account of a horse trailer found crammed with dogs piled on top of each other, some of whom were dead—an account eerily reminiscent of a slave ship (1965). PL 89-544, known today as the U.S. Animal Welfare Act (AWA) of 1966, was signed into law by President Johnson on August 24 of that year (Adams and Larson 2016).
These were hardly the first such stories to appear in the mainstream press regarding the role of pet-snatching as a means to supply animals to science. As historian Susan Lederer chronicles, the media mogul William Randolph Hearst was an avid supporter of anti-vivisectionism, and throughout the first half of the twentieth century, his newspapers chronicled many stories of pets stolen for research purposes in an effort to bring about legislative reforms (Lederer 1992, 63–64).12 Nevertheless, Life, well known for its persuasive photojournalism, proved especially effective in rallying public sentiment behind welfare reforms to protect animals used in research. Indeed, fifty years later, “Concentration Camps for Dogs” was credited during my interviews with activists, lab veterinarians, and animal law experts as facilitating the passing of the AWA.
In addition to gut-wrenching images of suffering animals, the photos in the Life essay especially relied heavily on powerful tropes of race, age, class, and regional difference, playing up conflicts in moral sensibility between an innocent public and elite research establishments, where the Humane Society and other animal welfare agencies served as powerful intermediaries in a clash between American families and experimental science. Indeed, the full array of Life photos taken by Stan Wayman (some of which did not appear in the original article) featured white families and, not unlike Phinizy, placed a special emphasis on traumatized children and home lives torn asunder.13 The icon of these injustices was the dog as family pet, as opposed to, say, a cat (a species widely used in laboratories at the time) or various types of working animals. The loving environment of family life stood in stark contrast to the research goals of large, private universities and medical schools, alongside pernicious middlemen who capitalized on the vulnerabilities of the former and the professional needs of the latter. As a result, Lucky, Lance, Red, and Pepper played pivotal roles in alerting the American public to a darker side of medical research. And whereas Phinizy’s essay reported examples from diverse locations around the country (illustrated by way of an artist’s drawings, not photographs), Life starkly portrayed regional class distinctions, most evident in the shocking images of Lester Brown’s hardscrabble compound in rural Maryland (located south of the Mason-Dixon Line in a region still tainted by Jim Crow), set against the upscale Boston suburb of Newton or the luxuries in store for a dog adopted into a household able to afford a comfy family car.14
Legislating Affective Welfare
Today, the AWA defines the bedrock of contemporary welfare practices in the United States involving the use, management, and treatment not only of dogs, but of an even wider array of animals in laboratory settings. Although not the first effort at animal welfare, it is widely regarded in the United States as the most effective and comprehensive form of legislation to date specifically in reference to the well-being of lab animals. The law—subsequently amended and refined in 1970, 1976, 1985, 1990, and 2002—empowers the USDA (which also oversees farm animal welfare) with oversight of “refined standards of care and extended coverage to animals in commerce, exhibition, teaching, testing, and research” (Adams and Larson 2016). USDA inspectors may arrive at a lab without warning and, when they identify infractions, impose sanctions, levy fines, suspend activities, or close down operations. As the Life and Sports Illustrated articles make clear, special concern during the original drafting of the AWA was the traffic in stolen pets and, more generally, widespread use of animals of unknown origin in medical research. This concern led to the licensing of two categories of animal suppliers by the USDA: Class B (or “random source”) dealers, who acquire animals from auctions, shelters, and private breeders, and Class A (or “purpose bred”) commercial facilities that specialize in a range of creatures selectively bred specifically for lab use (Adams and Larson 2016).
Indeed, during the course of my own career in the early 1980s, when I held an office job in the research wing of a major East Coast university, postdoctoral students took advantage of there being no leash law and regularly drove around at night in an unmarked van to capture both stray and pet dogs spotted on the city’s streets. These dogs became research subjects in a cardiac lab several floors below my office for projects funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Defense.15 Today this same city has among the strictest animal welfare laws in the country, and such “random source” practices are now prohibited. Although laws have long varied from state to state regarding the legality of acquiring presumably abandoned animals from streets and shelters for lab use, recent actions at the federal level might well sound the death knoll of the Class B dealer. In 2012 and 2014, the NIH ceased funding research involving, respectively, cats and dogs acquired from Class B facilities, and in December 2015 Congress approved an amendment to the 2016 Agricultural Bill that prohibits the USDA from relicensing Class B facilities.16 The proliferation of Class A facilities—referred to today by lab personnel as “vendors” and research “partners”—defines a specialized commerce in animals that, ironically, was spurred on in large part by efforts in the 1960s to save abducted house pets from science. As we shall see later in this chapter, whereas the AWA helped to eliminate many house pets from the equation, the Class A–bred experimental dog increases in moral value when labs transform “retired” animals into pets by “adopting” them out or “rehoming” (rather than euthanizing) them once they cease to be of use experimentally.
In turn, the AWA not only lays claim to lasting effects on welfare practices in labs; it has transformed how researchers acquire and think about animals. Personnel I encounter who currently work for the institution where I once worked generally are unaware that their predecessors conducted street sweeps for “strays” or that dogs ever occupied the building. Those with similar research interests have shifted their attention to less charismatic species in deliberate efforts to avoid hostile reactions from the public. Thus, whereas forty years ago a cardiac researcher might well have worked with captured stray and pet dogs, a decade or so later a postdoctoral student trained in that same lab might have gone on to purchase beagles from a Class A dealer when setting up her own lab. In turn, even more recent graduates in the same field might work with animals classified as “livestock,” such as sheep and calves or hybrid