86 HUMANE TREATMENT OF ANIMALS USED IN RESEARCH 
amounts of money spent on stainless steel and shiny tile, but these are far from 
being a guarantee of decent treatment of the animals. In a medical school fitted 
out with long stretches of gleaming corridors we found cats being kept in cages 
with nothing but wide-spaced one-way wires for floors. There were two cats 
in each of these cages, and in every case, one of them was perched on the feeding 
bowl to keep off the wires that pressed into their sensitive paws. In this same 
institution we saw a big jar full of white mice, piled on top of each other, upon 
which it was proposed to pour a bottle of liquid ether in order to kill them, 
the burning qualities of the liquid being disregarded. Here, too, we learned 
that large numbers of mice were dying of what the highly paid research worker 
thought was a mysterious disease but which turned out to be his failure to see 
that the animals upon which his research depended were given food that they 
could get their teeth into. They were being starved to death by ignorance and 
irresponsibility. What of the dogs in this institution? One lay dead, not yet 
observed by anyone, despite the endless assurances by the National Society for 
Medical Research of which I would like to give just one example. “Research 
dogs are more pampered than pets, kid gloves in the lab. If a Texas millionaire 
wanted to give his pet hound the world’s finest care, he would be hard put to 
equal the kid-gloves treatment which thousands of dogs receive today in modern 
animal research laboratories throughout the Nation.” This wildly untrue re- 
lease was used, according to the NSMR by 200 publications. How does this 
jibe with a manual gotten out in the NSMR’s home State and recommended 
by one of its most active board members? 
Here is the University of Minnesota’s recommendations on “how to clean a 
dog cage * * * after feeding all of the dogs in the area assigned to you, go back 
and remove any dead dogs from their cages.” On the next page it shows how to 
hose a dog cage with the dog in it : “Open the door slightly, holding it so the 
dog cannot jump out. Run the nozzle over the top of the door as shown in the 
drawing at the right. Wash the walls and bottom grate. Then rim the 
nozzle under the door to flush out the catch pan.” Incidentally, these quarters 
are new, less than 2 years old, so the decision to house dogs in basement cages 
three tiers high without provision for exercise and to hose the cages with the 
dogs inside was deliberate. According to the St. Paul Dispatch, February 16, 
1961, 700 dogs are housed thus, and a spokesman for the medical school was 
quoted as saying, “Research is big business at the university. In fact, Gov- 
ernment and foundations last year backed our medical research with more 
than $3 million in grants.” Business is a lot bigger this year with a total of 
$9,620,965 of the taxpayers’ money given this university by the National Insti- 
tutes of Health in 1961. 
In a far western medical school with the same glossy corridors and expen- 
sively equipped operating rooms more than 100 dogs cowered and yelped in a 
steaming windowless room which had just been hosed, dogs and all. Most 
pitiful were those whose painful and debilitating surgery prevented them from 
rising and who were soaking and shivering in the bottoms of the wet cages from 
which they would never be taken again unless it were for further experimen- 
tation or as carcasses. 
All but a handful of the many millions of animals that enter our laboratories 
each year, dogs, cats, monkeys, rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, rats, and mice 
are, of course, killed in the laboratory. Some are lucky. They are anesthetized 
and never brought back to consciousness. Some, too, may take part in a painless 
test and be anesthetized and killed at the conclusion. But there are uncounted 
myriads of others whose death is inflicted in a slow and painful manner, and 
there is an enormous variety of ways in which they may be made to suffer and 
die in the laboratory. Many involve far more agony and terror than the 
methods Congress has outlawed for the slaughter of animals that provide us 
with food. For example : exposure of rabbits to microwaves “produces an 
extremely violent reaction. Within 5 minutes desperate attempts are made 
to escape from the cage. Peripheral engorgement of all vessels yields an 
acrocyanotic picture. The ears develop a ‘fried’ or ‘cooked’ appearance. Forty 
minutes of exposure results in death.” Or starving dogs to death, sometimes 
in conjunction with major operations, for example, in one experiment the dogs 
were subjected to two separate operations in which the surgical mortality was 
so high that “the animals were not studied or standardized before surgery.” 
(“Complete bilateral paravertebral ganglionectomy and denervation of both 
adrenal glands.”) It is reported that “one dog died during the first fast and 
another during the first realimentation with casein.” For when the dogs were 
