200 HUMANE TREATMENT OE ANIMALS USED IN RESEARCH 
tary value of laboratory animals used annually in the United States will equal 
the value of all of the agricultural livestock produced each year by American 
farmers and ranchers. 
The physical magnitude of the activity with which H.R. 3556 is concerned al- 
most staggers the imagination. You gentlemen of the House of Representatives 
have this year voted to allow the National Institutes of Health to spend and give 
away some $840 million of public funds for medical research. Most of this activ- 
ity will involve use of animals. Other agencies of Government — Defense, Agri- 
culture, Commerce — also have been granted large funds for activities in which 
animals are used, the aggregate of authorizations running well past $1 billion in 
a single year. 
With the funds that you have authorized, the NIH will finance approximately 
12,000 individual research projects. 
And a committee of consultants, named by the Senate and headed by Bois- 
feuillet Jones, vice president and administrator of health services at Emory 
University, has estimated that by 1970 the medical research units will be asking 
you for a minimum of $2 billion a year. 
It will be necessary for me to say more, somewhat later, about the effect and 
significance of this prodigously accelerating expenditure of money. At this 
time my purpose is only to convey to you the nature and size of the problem 
that is being Considered. Some 300 million animals are being used in medical 
research in 1962 ; if present trends continue, the number in 1970 will approach 
1 billion. 
Any use of such a vast number of animals, constituting a great interstate 
commerce and paid for largely by public funds, is inevitably, sooner or later, 
going to demand control by law. 
Many of this vast number of animals are subjected to conditions and pro- 
cedures that cause pain and physical suffering. 
Pain and suffering, of course, are of many degrees. Many animais used in 
research suffer little more than the prick of a hypodermic needle or the discom- 
fort of confinement. But many other animals — many millions of animals every 
year— are subjected in our laboratories to pain of the greatest intensity that 
clever and knowledgeable men can devise. Indeed, in many recorded experiments 
the avowed central purpose has been to inflict extreme pain so that the effects 
of pain itself might be observed. 
The housing and care of animals in many large laboratories — i believe I would 
be correct if I said most laboratories — is disgraceful. 
I have myself, in the last 5 years, visited more than 40 of the largest and 
best known animal-using laboratories of the United States. I have seen and 
studied their animal cages, their records, their procedures, their personnel. 
I have been the immediate supervisor of staff investigators of the HSUS who 
have spent an aggregate of several years working inside medical school labora- 
tories as animal caretakers and laboratory technicians. 
In the course of this work and study of the subject I have seen tens of thous- 
ands of animals so inhumanely housed and cared for that the condition itself 
constituted cruelty. At Johns Hopkins University I have seen closely caged 
dogs suffering from advanced cases of bleeding mange, without treatment. At 
Georgetown University I have seen a German Shepherd dog confined in a base- 
ment cage so small that the animal could not stand erect. At Marquette Uni- 
versity I have seen 40 or 50 dogs locked up in rows and tiers of small cages, with 
no runway or exercise space available at any time for any of the animals. At 
Tulane University we found cats confined in cages suspended from the ceiling, 
with the wire mesh of the cage floors so widely spaced that the cats could not 
walk, stand, or lie down in normal manner. At New York University I walked 
for several hours, on a weekend, through several floors of caged dogs, cats, 
monkeys, rats, rabbits, sheep, and other animals, scores of them wearing the 
bandages of major surgery and many of them obviously desperately ill, without 
ever encountering any doctor, veterinarian, caretaker, or even a building janitor. 
The Overholzer Thoracic Clinic, in Massachusetts, has kept animals convalescing 
from surgery in such pigsty conditions that a Massachusetts court, on complaint 
of the Massachusetts SPCA, returned a verdict of illegal cruelty. 
At Loma Linda University, in California, unlicensed kennel men have per- 
formed “debarking” surgery on dogs. In the Children’s Hospital in Cincinnati 
one of our investigators found small rhesus monkeys chained by their neeks 
inside steel cages so small that the animals could barely move. Kennel men 
at Leiand Stanford University habitually, while we had an investigator working 
