Teddy’s Story
Every single morning, he shook out of pure fear when he woke up. This was the first few months of Teddy’s life with us.
The shaking is what made me realize just how much trauma this sweet dog went through in his life at a research laboratory.
Every morning, like clockwork, our rescue beagle named Teddy would wake up with us and — without anything startling him — the shaking would begin. His entire body trembled out of fear. He would keep his back to the headboard of our bed and shake until we picked him up and took him outside to potty. We realized he probably shook like this every day while held captive in the laboratory he came from. It was obvious that the fear etched upon his face had been with him all his life. Back in the lab, Teddy never knew what kind of torture each day would bring.
Though he was now in our loving home, Teddy didn’t yet recognize that he was safe. The only time he wasn’t shaking was when he was asleep. This went on for months.
When I had arrived at Kindness Ranch Animal Sanctuary in Hartville, Wyoming to bring Teddy home, I had no idea what to expect. This was my first time adopting an animal who had been used in research.
Teddy was brought in for a meet and greet where he appeared unsure of everything around him. He walked very low to the ground, and every noise he heard made him fearful.
I placed him in the car with me to make the trek back home to Minnesota. I had a whole back seat full of fuzzy blankets and toys for him, but Teddy wanted only to lie on the stiff floorboard of my car, his nose tucked under the seat the entire drive back home.
We stopped at a hotel for the night. Teddy would not eat, drink, or even sleep in the bed I bought for him. Instead, he wanted to sleep in the tiny, hard nightstand next to the hotel bed:
Teddy would not leave this space all night despite my attempts to place him on the soft, cozy bed. I tried using treats to coax him out of the nightstand cubby, but he was too afraid. Devastatingly, he was only comfortable sleeping in the tiny, dark space with no blanket — because that was what he was used to.
We finally made it home and introduced him to our other rescue beagle, Ellie, and over time Teddy started to learn how to be a dog, not a mere test subject.
Teddy is now a loved member of our family. At first, he did not display the usual behaviors or natural instincts of a dog. Until he joined our family, he had never been allowed or given the opportunity to be a normal dog. Any and all of his instincts had been suppressed during his life in the lab. But, over time, this started to change.
I remember the first time we saw some instinctual behavior from Teddy was when we gave him a little orange and white stuffed mushroom toy. He had no clue how to play with it — all he knew was he had an instinct to bury it. So he would find any corner of the house and try to bury this toy in the carpet. It was the first dog instinct we saw with Teddy and it truly melted our hearts.
We started to see Teddy’s fearful behavior leave him, and he began to blossom into a remarkable and loyal companion. He got more comfortable without his back up against the wall and walking in open rooms. After four months with us, he barked for the very first time. And best of all, his morning fearful shaking stopped.
With a lot of love and understanding, and with the help of our other rescue beagle, Ellie, Teddy has learned how to be a dog.
Teddy now plays at the dog park with other dogs, barks at squirrels, begs for treats, and steals our socks — all the things he was born to do. He is confident. He is the most loving dog I have ever owned. And the only shaking he does now is due to his bushy tail that wags so hard it shakes his entire body out of joy and love.
Ellie’s Story
Ellie came to us as a puppy from Envigo, a mass beagle breeding facility in Cumberland, Virginia. This facility was shut down due to the many unexplained deaths of beagles and horrid living conditions.
Envigo bred beagles by the thousands and sold them to research labs in the US and around the world for use in research and testing. Researchers often use beagles in particular because of their sweet nature and compact size.
Beagles’ sweet and docile nature is used against them.
No matter how many times humans come at them with needles or tubes to be shoved down their throats, they still love people. Thousands upon thousands of these dogs are sold off to laboratories where they’re forced to endure the horrors of medical research, pharmaceutical research, or toxicity research.
In these research facilities, the beagles are often subjected to painful medical procedures without pain relief. To start, these facilities will often begin by cutting the dogs’ vocal cords so they cannot audibly bark or even whimper from pain.
Some of these dogs are forced to inhale toxic chemicals for hours at a time. They give their paws for blood draws. They are trained to not fight back when being restrained for testing. They are force-fed or injected with new pharmaceutical drugs to test the side effects. And at the end of the studies, most of these dogs are either killed or subjected to another round of testing of a different drug, toxic chemical, cosmetic, or pesticide.
So-called “lab dogs” usually live in bleak cages, never experiencing the outside world. Most never leave the facility where they are captive, meaning their paws have never walked on soft grass, their eyes have never seen the open sky, and they have never played with toys.
These dogs live a life of fear of what each day will bring. This was the life that was in store for my sweet, full of life and love, Ellie. Had Envigo been allowed to continue its beagle breeding operation in Virginia, Ellie would have either been sold and tortured in a laboratory until she was killed, or she would have been forced to breed for years until she was useless, then killed.
Ellie has so much energy, spirit, and joy. But I know all that would have been crushed out of her had she ended up in a laboratory.
Many people think that animal research improves human lives, but the truth is that these tests have a 90% failure rate. Millions of animals are being sacrificed for nothing.
The law often requires companies to conduct research on animals so their drugs, therapies, and products may be deemed “safe” for humans. But why are we putting these sweet, unwilling creatures through research and testing that fails nine times out of ten? The truth is that it all comes down to money.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest funder of animal research worldwide, spends billions of dollars on animal research each year.
You and I pay for this senseless torture.
Yes, with our own tax dollars, we pay for these experiments. Research entities are funded and awarded grants by our government so they may continue this practice. These well funded labs and mass breeding facilities like Envigo, Marshall BioResources, and many others are not well supervised or inspected. They are not held strongly accountable for animal mistreatment or wrongful deaths in their facilities. If they are caught with abuse or unexplained deaths, they are typically fined a small amount and then allowed to continue to conduct their research or continue the mass breeding. The animals affected include not just dogs but cats, horses, monkeys, pigs, rats, mice, hamsters, goats, sheep, and many more too numerous to list.
More than 110 million animals are used and abused each year for research.
There are alternatives to this type of research. There are non-animal tests that scientists have developed that have been proven to work in the science community and would help eliminate the use of animals in research and testing. If these companies were really concerned about replacing animals with non animal testing methods, they would have done it by now. They are more concerned about money and not changing the out-of-date laws and rules to end this cruelty. As long as they are being funded by our tax dollars, they don’t have to change and will not change — unless we speak out and demand change.
As human beings, we need to and can do better.
You can help stop this madness by putting pressure on your lawmakers to change the laws that allow this to continue. With such an astronomical failure rate, isn’t it obvious that animal research is about money rather than improving the lives of humans?
Research entities see animals as dollar signs, not living beings.
We have a responsibility to change the status quo and improve the lives of humans without torturing animals to do it. We need to bring to light the greed that is killing all kinds of animals by the thousands every day in the name of science and using our tax dollars to fund it. We need to demand more funding be given to scientists who are developing non-animal testing methods instead of millions of dollars being given to failed experiments, wastefulness, and cruelty. We need to demand that more research labs give these animals a second chance at life after being researched on instead of killing them.
Amazing organizations like Rise for Animals, Kindness Ranch, Beagle Freedom Project, and many more are working to save the lives of animals exploited in research and testing.
I am so grateful to Rise for Animals for allowing me to tell Teddy and Ellie’s stories.
Every day when we come home from work, we are greeted at the door with joy, love, and tail wags. We cannot imagine our life without them.
Ellie’s favorite thing to do is to run and play fetch with a tennis ball. She can do (and has done!) this for hours straight.
Teddy’s favorite thing to do is snuggle and watch movies with us.
They both love to play with each other, go on adventures and fun walks in the woods, and snooze in patches of sunshine. To think that Ellie and Teddy were bred only for research and nothing more is shameful.
Right now, countless animals are being tortured instead of playing fetch and snuggling and sleeping in the sunshine. All the animals used in research deserve better. All these animals want to do is to love us and be loved by us. It’s time for a change.
One way we can help protect animals just like Teddy and Ellie is by joining together to change the laws!
Both Teddy and Ellie beat the odds — finding themselves among the far less than 1% of animals who survive the animal research industry — and, indeed, Ellie’s rescue from Envigo was only made possible by existing laws. These laws included Virginia’s 2022 “Beagle Bills”, which provide some protections for dogs and cats bred and sold for animal research within the state. Among other items, these bills prohibit animal research breeders from selling dogs and cats if they’ve been recently cited by the USDA and require animal research breeders and facilities to make certain dogs and cats available for adoption placement (which is what saved Ellie!).
Teddy’s and Ellie’s guardians want to see similar laws passed in other states and hope that Teddy’s and Ellie’s stories will inspire you to take action now to protect other victims.
Share this page on Facebook or X (Twitter)