HUMANE TREATMENT OF ANIMALS USED IN RESEARCH 317 
conclude that the proposed bills, H.R. 1937 and H.R. 3556, are not necessary, 
that they will add to Federal costs for research, that they will restrict freedom 
in exploration of ideas, and that they are not practical. 
Statement oe Juliet Rainey, Chicago 
There can be only one possible argument for the use of living animals for 
experimentation: the furtherment of useful knowledge. Unfortunately, this 
argument is often lightly used to cover a multitude of atrocities which do 
nothing to increase knowledge and do cause an untold amount of unnecessary 
suffering. 
Any animals used for research should be properly and adequately housed, 
with comfortable bedding, plenty of room for exercise, clean conditions, and 
responsible people on hand to care for them in case of sickness. This is the 
very least we owe to them. But this we do not usually give them. 
I have been a technican in a large medical school, and I can witness to the 
fact that dogs are housed in cages scarcely big enough to turn around in, with- 
out bedding and with only a metal mesh for floor; that attendants very often 
forget to feed or give water to mice in their crowded cages, and death very 
often results before the negligence is noticed; that the stench coming from 
the building where all these animals — dogs, cats, rabbits, mice, rats, guinea 
pigs, etc., are housed, indicates inadequate care ; that there is no trained veter- 
inarian in evidence; that guinea pigs are sometimes killed by being hurled at 
a table top; that the same dogs are used again and again for operations, and 
sometimes collapes from weakness as they are dragged back to the scene of 
experimentation. 
The following is an example, from my experience, of callousness and incom- 
petence that caused great suffering to an animal. 
An experimenter (a doctor of medicine) was preparing to bleed a rabbit 
directly from the heart. This is of necessity a painful process needing care- 
ful handling when, as in this particular experiment, anesthetic is not used. 
There were three or four prolonged periods of terrible squealing from the rabbit. 
This was on Friday. 
The following Monday it was learned that the animal had broken its back 
in its struggles. The experiment had been postponed and it was still alive. A 
humane animal caretaker, after observing it in its cage, came to ask me what 
was wrong. He was very angry and insistent that action be taken. The rab- 
bit should have been immediately destroyed. However, it was killed several 
hours later as planned, by withdrawal of blood from the heart without anes- 
thetic, in spite of the broken back. 
We must hasten to impose some firm and reasonable legislation upon all 
this. I can see no possible excuse for us to allow any longer the unnecessary, 
useless misery of millions of animals, and I urge enactment of H.R. 1937 and 
S. 3088. 
Statement of the National Society foe Medical Research, Submitted by 
Ralph A. Rohweder 
MORE PAMPERED THAN PETS 
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. 
In immaculately kept “vivariums” maintained by government health agen- 
cies, universities, pharmaceutical laboratories, and research hospitals through- 
out the United States and Canada, dogs and dozens of other animals from mice 
to goats are vastly more pampered than the most prized household pets — and 
for good reason. 
Scientists engaged in the continuing struggle to preserve and prolong life — ■ 
both for human beings and animals — need to test lifesaving drugs and study 
other medical procedures on living organisms. They must study life in order 
to protect life. 
“Without animal experimentation,” says Dr. Morris Fishbein, editor of Medi- 
cal World News and longtime former editor of the Journal of the American 
Medical Association, “We would not have serums or vaccines, anesthetics or 
