HUMANE TREATMENT OF ANIMALS USED IN RESEARCH 217 
proper. It would only give a set of standards from the Congress to 
the controlling agency and say, “these are the standards you are to 
follow in allocating Federal funds.” 
Mr. Rogers of Florida. Thank you. 
Mr. Roberts. Mrs. Madeline Bemelmans from New York. I be- 
lieve Mrs. Bemelmans stated to the clerk that she was up against a 
plane schedule. 
Mrs. Stevens. She had to leave. 
(The statement of Madeline Bemelmans, Society for Animal Pro- 
tective Legislation, is as follows :) 
Statement of Madeleine Bemelmans, President of the Society for Animal 
Protective Legislation 
My name is Madeleine Bemelmans and I represent the Society for Animal Pro- 
tective Legislation. Personal visits to laboratories and research in medical 
journals and books at Columbia University have convinced me that experimental 
animals are in desperate need of legal protection. Before I had ever been to a 
laboratory, I asked a doctor about the treatment of animals used in research and 
he said, “Oh, they are treated with such consideration, it’s just unbelievable.” 
But when my misgivings persisted and I mentioned reports of abuses to a woman 
doctor she answered, “True, and true again, but nobody wants to stick their neck 
out by talking.” So I steeled myself to see for myself and can bear witness to in- 
excusable conditions. I have seen emaciated, mutilated animals, dogs who were 
given no sedation after major surgery, dogs trembling and withdrawn or franti- 
cally barking, mice and rabbits agonized by mite infestation to the point that raw 
flesh and deep red holes in both ears were Visible. 
The pain and discomfort resulting from experimentation is often compounded 
by bad housing and lack of exercise. Anyone, who has known a dog, can appre- 
ciate the physical deterioration and mental suffering of dogs who are never re- 
leased from their cages. Yet, again and again, we are told, “Dogs do well in 
cages. How can you tell they’re not happy?” Frequently, cages are inadequate 
in size, so that rats have to pile up, one on top of the other, rabbits cannot stretch 
out in a natural position, and dogs cannot hold up their heads. Once I com- 
plained that a large hunting type dog was in a cage much too small for him and 
the attendant answered, “This blame dog just grew too fast.” Oats suffer when 
they have nothing but wire mesh to lie upon and this same widely spaced wire 
makes standing difficult and painful. Monkeys, so curious and active by nature, 
are generally kept in bare cages with nothing to relieve the boredom of their 
long captivity. One particularly pathetic example was a young monkey, sepa- 
rated from its mother and brought up in isolation, with the result that, when ap- 
proached, it cowered in fear and bared its teeth. It is not my purpose to pass 
judgment on individual experiments, but I think we already know that children 
brought up without love become antisocial and delinquent. 
Ordinarily, the layman visiting a laboratory cannot learn too much about the 
experiments themselves; by way of illustration, therefore, I should like to read 
excerpts concerning two experiments described in the Physiological Review of 
April 1960 (pt. 2, supp. No. 4, vol. 40). The first is taken from a paper by Dr. 
O. A. Smith ( Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Department of Anatomy, 
University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, Wash.) on animals in 
which hypothalamic lesions had been induced. He says, “As a matter of fact, we 
ran one dog and we wanted to run him to exhaustion. There were no heart rate 
changes to exercise in this dog. We turned on the treadmill and let him run 
until he fell down. This was after about 4% or 5 minutes. The only trouble 
with his observation was that the animal had urinated, and we were afraid he 
slipped on the urine and that this was the reason for his falling down, not a 
failure of the cardiac output or an oxygen deficit.*’ 
The second experiment concerns cardiovascular reflexes : “Dykman and 
Gannt have reported one dog that developed a marked tachyardia to the ex- 
perimental environment as a result of traumatic electrical stimulation. The 
animal accidentally received three shocks of high intensity (60-cycle a.c.) in 
one daily training session during the middle of orienting training * * *. On the 
day following the shocks, the dog appeared to be only mildly upset ; but during 
the next 24 days he became progressively more disturbed, cowering at the sight 
