HUMANE TREATMENT OF ANIMALS USED IN RESEARCH 271 
unable to stand up or lie down in a normal position. The rabbits are allowed 
only to crouch, as their cages are so small. At one institution a dog that had 
recently undergone major surgery (open heart operation) had a litter of six 
puppies. The mother and all her puppies had to lie on wire mesh and when the 
puppies (whose eyes had not yet opened) moved, their paws went between the 
openings of the wire mesh. Even to the most uninformed person, this treatment 
could never be construed as humane care, nor for that matter as adequate care. 
The cruelty to the puppies could be so easily avoided if one had a proper cage or 
if, lacking this, a common, ordinary newspaper had been used to give support to 
the mother and her puppies. 
It has often been said that, “Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” and one who has 
visited almost any place that houses animals will presume that he is entering the 
opposite place from heaven. The degree of this feeling is of course dependent 
on the ability to keep the cages clean and dispose of the wastes. If this is done 
twice a day, the odor is mild, but if it is done once a month or week, it becomes 
positively unhealthy for the animals and for any person entering the quarters. 
This is one of the main complaints of any person who inspects and the need for 
legislation to set a standard is very necessary and long overdue. 
In many animal rooms, the cages are stacked in tiers, so that it is impossible 
to clean them properly. Often on Sunday no one is in attendance, so no animal 
gets any fresh water or food. At one place I visited, the attendant informed me 
that hamsters should only have water through vegetables, while at another I 
heard that cats didn’t ever drink water. These are, of course, idiotic statements 
for anyone so to inform visitors and would tend to show that the care, feeding, 
and watering must be enforced by law. 
After a person who has visited one of these animal quarters leaves, he will 
be aware that he has been either lucky that he has been to a unit which has 
humane care and treatment for their animals, or with a sense of hurt and lack of 
faith in the human race that people could care so little for live animals who are 
devoting their lives and being for the preservation and betterment of life for 
man. In the latter case, the comments range from “inhumane” to “inexcusably 
deplorable,” and one wonders why a law has never been passed to protect these 
animals. 
One has only to go through a number of organizations which keep animals for 
the purpose of experiments and tests to come across an example of complete 
misery and pain. Many times after a dog or some other animal has been used 
for practice surgery by some young doctor in training and the operation has been 
completed, the animal is returned to his cage without any recovery care, either 
to live or die. Why cannot this same young doctor learning to operate complete 
the case by painlessly destroying the animal? One can readily realize that 
legislation is needed so that the animal will be destroyed painlessly as soon as 
he has completed his value in training or research. 
I feel also that there is undoubtedly a great deal of duplication of research 
and certainly some useless research performed which could be controlled by 
legislation. By having a set of standards enacted by legislature, we could 
make our researchers more careful and considerate. If they were to set this 
standard for animals, they would also set this standard for their research and 
I am sure make greater strides than they have heretofore. 
You are no doubt being offered many methods under which the care of ani- 
mals used for experiments and tests could be accomplished. One method which 
has been suggested is by voluntary control by some research organization. Un- 
fortunately, voluntary control never fully succeeds. If it did, we would no 
longer need the Internal Revenue Service to check our tax returns, as we could 
have some voluntary group, such as our friends, check our returns. We would 
no longer need our State Department, as all countries would be able to solve 
their problems through voluntary control, such as the United Nations. I would 
again stress at this point the need for Federal legislation covering the humane 
treatment of animals used for experiments and tests and the humane design of 
experiments and prevention of needless pain infliction. 
I happen to be a partner of a New York Stock Exchange firm and am regu- 
lated in my transaction of business by several organizations. These are the 
Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Association of Security 
Dealers, and the New York Stock Exchange, as well as my firm’s rules. All 
stock exchange firms have the same regulations and yet one finds by reading the 
newspapers that some infractions, either large or small, of the rules do occur 
and must be dealt with. This unfortunately will be the case with the humane 
