202 HUMANE TREATMENT OF ANIMALS USED IN RESEARCH 
In all cases, the Rochester experimenters anesthetized the dog before pressure 
of 2,000 pounds per square inch was applied to the dog’s leg. Each dog remained 
in the press for several hours and “in no case” was any anesthetic given during 
the last hour in the press. Nor was any anesthesia or sedative given later, while 
the dog lived. 
The dogs usually died, in extreme pain, in from 5 to 12 hours after being re- 
leased from the press but some dogs survived the ordeal for 24 hours. Dogs — 
fully conscious — were tied down on a table for 12 hours after being taken out of 
the press. And I must repeat, none was given any drug to relieve pain. 
In a study of medical periodicals a research team of the HSUS has found 
reports of 143 other projects in which dogs were subjected to the Blalock press 
or to virtually identical equipment and procedures, the total number of animals 
used in these specific experiments being more than 4,000. Our search of the 
literature was by no means exhaustive. 
There are many ingenious ways to send a dog into the kind of shock that is a 
result of injury and pain. Research workers of Columbia University, reporting 
in the American Journal of Physiology, volume 148, dated January 1947, used a 
rawhide mallet instead of the Blalock press. The technique was simple. The 
dog was lightly anesthetized with ether — not enough, the investigators reported, 
to eliminate “the element of ‘feel’,” then its hind legs were beaten with a raw- 
hide mallet. About 1,000 blows were administered. 
Ether was discontinued as soon as the beating stopped. 
Of 30 dogs used, 25 eventually died of their injuries but they lived from 1 
to 9 hours before they died. 
This other piece of equipment on the table is known as a Noble-Collip drum. 
It, too, has been very widely used to produce shock in animals. The procedure 
is described in detail in an article entitled “A Quantitative Method for the 
Production of Experimental Traumatic Shock Without Hemorrhage in Unan- 
esthetized Animals,” published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental 
Physiology, 31 :187-199, 1941-12. 
The experimenter — if indeed this procedure can still be called experimental 
after many repetitions — customarily tapes together the forefeet and the hindfeet 
of a rat or guinea pig and places the helpless, unesthetized animal in this drum. 
A door is then closed over the front of the drum and the drum is then revolved 
by a small electric motor at a rate of about 200 revolutions per minute. The im- 
prisoned animal is carried nearly to the top of the wheel by centrifugal force 
and then is dropped by gravity to the bottom. The steel projections within the 
wheel insure that the animal will be efficiently injured. 
Animals subjected to this procedure ultimately become unconscious in the 
wheel but most of them regain consciousness for a time after removal. Like the 
products of the Blalock press and the rawhide hammer, they live several con- 
scious hours before they die in pain. 
I wish to reemphasize, here, that I am not at this time raising any question 
about the necessity for or utility of the experiments or procedures that I am 
describing. I am most rigorously excluding opinion from the discusion; I am 
intent only on giving you facts about what happens to animals in research 
laboratories. With the facts before you, the decision as to whether such things 
should be subject to control by law will be yours to make. 
You should know about experiments that involve burning of animals. I have 
heard it repeatedly said, by seemingly sincere scientists, that animals do not 
suffer in laboratories. I wonder most often whether such witnesses have read 
the scientific literature of research into burns. 
For example, a Harvard University research team has studied the effects of 
severe burns of pigs. The pig was selected for this study because of the histo- 
logical resemblance of porcine skin to that of human beings. 
The Harvard pigs were tied on a steel grate about 2 feet over pans full of 
gasoline in a concrete, fireproof room. The gasoline was ignited by an electric 
spark. 
In another experiment, dogs were forced to take 120 inhalations of air heated 
to 500° C. The dog was anesthetized while breathing the searing air but not 
later. One such dog lived 4 hours. 
Other dogs were forced to inhale actual flame. Animals of that group were 
killed 3 to 5 days after the inhalation. 
All of the last three experiments that I have described were reported in a 
symposium on burns, sponsored by a committee of the National Research Council, 
on November 2-4, 1950. 
