A dog's life: the controversy over pound animals in medical research, 1920-1966, November 12, 1992

Susan Lederer: In 1936, George Orwell wrote, that all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others, and that's as true in a fairy story or a political allegory as it has been in the history of opposition to animal experimentation. Some animals have merited greater concern than others. In 20th century America, and particularly in the period that I'm going to be focusing on this evening, 1920 to 1966, the special status of pet animals and dogs, in particular, created unique problems for American medical researchers. And this evening, I wanted to discuss some of the challenges that investigators experienced in acquiring sufficient dogs for the laboratory, for both research and teaching, in reporting their experiments involving dog subjects in the medical literature, and in mediating the very negative image of medical science fostered in the anti-vivisection literature. As I said, I'm going to focus on the years before 1966. That's when Congress passed the first federal legislation regulating obtaining animals for research, and I'll come back to that at the end of my talk. Now, in the early 20th century, research was a much less formal undertaking. There were no animal care and use committees, and of course there was very little funding for research. Investigators relied largely on their own ingenuity to acquire and to maintain experimental animals. I have spent time in the archives of medical schools, and there are stories of people negotiating for hospital scraps to feed dogs in their experimental dog colony. Experimenters who require dogs for study had essentially three options: They could establish their own breeding colonies or experimental farms; they could purchase animals from individuals or dealers; or they could make arrangements with humane shelters, municipal dog pounds, where stray animals were collected before being destroyed. Dogs were used in a variety of experimental procedures, even though dogs were not the most widely used research animal. By the 1930's, the rat had become the leading research subject in this country. Many investigators considered the dog indispensable for both research and teaching. By the 1930s, research involving dogs had generated considerable clinical advances. Particularly, the discovery of insulin for the treatment of diabetes, and the development of the liver treatment for pernicious anemia. And dogs continued to be important in studies or research on cardiovascular physiology, studies of blood pressure, hypertension, and blood transfusion. Very few investigators opted to raise their own dogs, largely because of the enormous cost involved in the undertaking - in the feeding, the care, the maintenance of these animals. Unless dogs of known pedigree were required for a particular study, investigators preferred to purchase animals or to obtain them from local dog pounds. For very similar reasons, commercial breeders who supplied laboratories with small animals; rodents, guinea pigs, other small animals, they declined to invest in experimental dog colonies. As F.G. Carnochan explained in 1944, when the Carworth Farms, a major supplier of mice, rats, and other small animals, was asked to produce dogs in sufficient quantities for researchers who were working to develop a distemper vaccine, he explained that if they were to produce dogs they would cost $18 per animal. A price that laboratories were either unwilling or unable to meet. And, as you might expect, a cost of $18 per dog did compare very unfavorably with the two to three dollars charged by dealers, or the 75 cents to one dollar charged by the animal shelter. Relying on dealers and animal shelters, however, were far from perfect solutions for American researchers. Medical schools who purchased dogs from individuals sometimes found that the dogs had, in fact, been stolen from their owners, and in order to reduce the possibility of experimenting on pet dogs, many medical schools, I think, most medical schools, adopted a policy of holding an animal for 24-48 hours, in some cases for a week, to give owners the opportunity to come to the medical school animal house and see if their dog had, in fact, turned up there. The location of lost pets in medical school animal houses was not uncommon, however, it was sufficiently common at Johns Hopkins Hospital that the animal keepers, in fact, kept on hand a printed form that they had owners sign giving some sort of identifying mark before they could take their dog home. Now, this issue of stolen pets in the medical schools received enormous publicity in the American anti-vivisection literature. Anti-vivisectionists continued to oppose any use of animals in medical research. In the late 1920s, the American anti-vivisectionists the movement, had enjoyed a remarkable resurgence. Just in 1926, in fact, William Henry Welch had declared that the movement was dead, but by 1929/1930 many medical researchers were greatly alarmed by the resurgence of activity on the anti-vivisectionist front. I think the success, in part, reflected their increasingly restricted focus on pet animals, dogs and cats that could become the subjects of bio-medical experimentation. Forget guinea pigs and cats, Washington attorney May Helm advised the members of the Marilyn anti-vivisection society in 1932, and concentrate on dogs. Now several considerations influenced their focus on dog protection. In the 1920s an estimated eight million Americans owned dogs, and I think that really is an estimate. I just saw today in the New York Times that now 52.5 million dogs reside in homes in America. But stories of heroic dogs who had rescued soldiers from fox holes during the Great War had reached a wide audience. The popularity of dog races, and dog shows, movie star dogs, the growth of the retail dog food industry, a genre of dog literature, all suggest massive cultural interest in the dog. I should say, Millie is apparently not the first White House dog to have a literary career. In 1922, President Harding's Airedale Terrier, Laddie Boy, also published a very popular account of life in the White House. Now, appealing to the dogs record of heroic service during World War I, anti-vivisectionists attempted to pursue legislation to exempt the dog altogether from medical research. These so called dog bills were introduced in great number in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, at both the state and federal level. In the years 1929 through 1933, the AMA's bureau of legal medicine monitored the fate of dog bills in seven state legislatures, and before two congressional committees. These legislative efforts, although never successful, required at least some biomedical researchers to testify annually at hearings at state houses or in the halls of Congress, on the importance of the dog to biomedical research. As one medical writer observed, in some states the convening of the legislature is virtually a date to include on the medical school calendar, like the opening of the fall school session, and the dates of the Christmas vacation period. Now, in addition to these legislative proposals, anti-vivisectionists closely monitored the acquisition of dogs for the laboratory. Although stories of lost pets turning up in medical school kennels had long been a feature of anti-vivisectionist literature, and remember the movement dates from the 1860s, charges of petnapping and the eleventh-hour rescue of pet dogs "lost or stolen from comfortable homes and loving owners" received considerable publicity in the Hearst newspaper chain, and in the anti-vivisectionist literature in the 1930s and 40s. Susan, could I have the first slide? To give you a flavor of some of these early appeals to pet owners, this is a cartoon that appeared in Life Magazine, not the photographic Life Magazine, but the earlier comic magazine, with a caption, "Mister, have you seen our dog?" You see two small children seeking their pet, which is in the experimental laboratory. This is an exhibit that appeared in a shop window operated by the American Anti-Vivisection Society in Philadelphia, with its companion piece, "Have you lost your cat?", and then the Anti-Vivisection Society took this display to major cities along the Eastern Seaboard. Anti-vivisection societies encouraged owners of lost pets to seek their animals at medical schools and hospitals. When Frederic Conrad lost his German police dog in 1935, he advertised in the lost and found columns of the Baltimore Evening Sun. He received several postcards from various anti-vivisection societies advising him to check his pet's whereabouts in various medical schools and institutions, and he was reunited with his dog at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The business manager reported that the dog had been purchased for the sum of one dollar from an unidentified individual who had presented the animal for sale. Alan Mason Chesney, Dean of the Hopkins Medical School, informed the newspapers that Hopkins' policy did not permit the purchase of animals that seemed to be pets, but at the time of sale the Conrad dog wore no collar or had any identifying marks. And although this arrangement for buying dogs, Chesney conceded, was not entirely satisfactory, Hopkins had little choice because the local humanity shelter, or the local humane shelter, would not supply animals for experimental purposes. Chesney did promise, however, that thereafter the acquisition of dogs at Hopkins would include the reading of lost dog advertisements. Now the problem of stolen pets led some medical schools to stop the purchase of single animals, and to restrict their animal acquisition to reputable dealers. "Animals are purchased only from licensed suppliers who meet the requirements of local governmental agencies", reported Harvard professor Sidney Farber, in 1945. "There is no traffic with boys or private individuals." Now, I should say, that this Harvard policy did follow the widely-reported arrest in 1937 of a 20-year-old Medford, Massachusets cat snatcher discovered with 11 cats in a burlap sack in his car. Ralph Dividio explained that the Harvard Medical School would only purchase cats in lots of 12, for which he received the sum of $8.40, or 70 cents a cat. Dividio was found guilty of pet theft and cruelty to animals, and he served a four-month sentence in the house of corrections. And as this incident suggests, I think that some of the policies that were adopted to deter the theft of pets could have negative consequences both for the animals involved and for the medical schools and their relations with their neighbors. Some medical institutions, such as the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, preferred to limit their dog purchases to dealers who obtained their animals out of state. But in addition to raising the cost per dog, this policy required a longer travel time for animals. The stress of travel in cramped quarters without food or water for several hours hastened the spread of such infectious diseases such as distemper. And researchers acknowledged that large research animals did deteriorate in the transfer to laboratories. In addition to receiving dogs and cats of uncertain age, of unknown genetic constitution, and a variable past history, again, Harvard professor Sidney Farber observed that research workers were compelled to accept the animals "which are ill or who must recover from the rigors of a long train or auto journey, which is a hardship, even under the most humane conditions". Some researchers attempted to adapt themselves to the limitations imposed by the quality of available dogs. "In experimental investigations it's usually desirable to employ only normal animals" explained Frank Mann, head of the division of experimental surgery at the Mayo Clinic. But, since this ideal condition was hardly ever obtained, laboratories had to fall back on the use of diseased and incapacitated animals. Some investigators did remark that the lowered resistance of animals subjected to the strains of transport to laboratories, in efforts to account for some of the failures of their experiments. For example, in a paper demonstrating the production of experimental peritonitis through the injection of bacteria, the investigator R. Alan Varrant, explained that his demonstration succeeded in this one case because, "The dogs used were in very poor condition. They were those half-starved animals, which arrive in every experimental laboratory, and are usually cared for and properly nourished for a few days before being used." Now these frank descriptions about the condition of research animals and their experiences in the laboratory often later appeared abstracted in the anti-vivisectionist literature. And some members of the research community attempted to adopt more stringent editorial policies in published reports of experiments involving dogs. At the leading biomedical research journal, The Journal of Experimental Medicine, the editor, Francis Peyton Rous and his assistants, in fact, carefully scrutinized all incoming manuscripts with an eye to preempting potential conflict with anti-vivisectionists. In the years between 1920 and 1950, the editorial staff at the JEM followed very explicit guidelines for discussing such topics as the use of anesthesia, the representation of animal numbers, the use of animal names to refer to animals, and photographs of animal subjects. Reporting experiments on dogs was a particular concern at the Journal. Very briefly, the guidelines advised such specific work substitutions for laboratory descriptions that could be misunderstood by lay readers. And these included the substitution of the word fasting instead of starving; the use of hemorrhaging instead of bleeding; and intoxicant instead of poison. The guidelines also advised authors to avoid such qualifying descriptions as acute, or intense, and severe, anything describing suffering or weakness too graphically. Instead, impersonal medical terms were to be used in these descriptions of dog experiments of dog and other animals. This substitution of objective medical descriptions helped to transform the animal subject into a research specimen. Deleting the details of an animal's activity, either before or during, an experimental procedure helped to focus attention on the research product rather than the process. Authors were instructed to delete any description of strapping an animal to a restraining board as well as any mention of an animal's vocalizations, either before or during an experiment. The guidelines were especially stringent about the use of potentially distressing visual images. Concern that photographs from the Journal would later appear in the anti-vivisectionist literature prompted very explicit rules. This is a quote from the guidelines: "When the condition of the animal is unsightly, avoid photographs showing the entire animal. In giving an illustration of the operation, do not show the entire animal, give only a picture of the lesion, or limb, or portion of the body involved, or the organs operated on." Restricting representation to these affected areas, instead of to the entire animal, limited the emotional content of these laboratory photographs. This photograph rule was stringently applied to dog subjects. When Harvard physiologist Cecil Drinker, for example, insisted that photographs of the experimental production of elephantiasis in dogs accompany his article for the Journal he, and editor Peyton Rous, engaged in a protracted dispute. Rous initially rejected Drinker's pictures, explaining that "a swollen dog's leg can readily be imagined" and that Drinker's work to uninformed laymen will look as if you had put yourself out deliberately to make dogs looks very uncomfortable. Photographs, Rous insisted, were only acceptable when they illustrated a condition that could not be well described in words. And although he acknowledged the potential for offending anti-vivisectionists, Drinker maintained that the photographs were absolutely necessary to his article and he threatened to publish elsewhere. When Rous failed to relent, Drinker took his manuscript and photographs to the American Journal of Physiology, which, in fact, published them, and where the editors were less sensitive to anti-vivisectionist criticism. I am going to come back to that slide. This is the photograph that Rous felt was too controversial to appear in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. Now, the JEM guidelines diminished some dimensions of the physical presence of animals and their experience in the laboratory, and this was especially important in the case of dogs and cats reflecting, again, the anti-vivisectionist movement's investment in the protection of pet animals. The editorial staff, for example, advised journal authors never to state where animals had been obtained, particularly if they had been obtained from the municipal pound, thereby avoiding the issue of a research animal's former status as a pet. The further segregation of the categories of pet and research subject were accomplished by deleting references to animals by name. References to surgical experiments performed on dogs named Tramp, or Whitey, or Mother were troublesome because they blurred the line between pet dog and laboratory subjects. And those are how the dogs are referred to in the American Journal of Physiology. Authors were similarly cautioned not to use he or she, his or her, in referring to an animal, but always to employ the gender-neutral pronouns it and its. Criticism about the large number of animals in research led to a variety of strategies to represent the numbers of animals used. The editorial staff, for example, advised omission of the number of animals killed in order to master an experimental technique. I'm going to go ... oops. Well, the slide I was going to show you shows some of the manuscript changes on a paper that was reporting the determination of pulmonary arterial pressure in albino rats. The authors initially described their work with a total of 76 rats. However, because a large number of deaths occurred in the very early stages of the research before the investigators developed their technique, the manuscript was subsequently altered. The report, the published paper, omitted discussion of the high initial operative mortality of 42 rats and instead cited a total number of 34 satisfactory arterial pressure readings. I think that's the dog pictures slide. So why don't we just leave that one out? Speaker #2: You want that one? Susan Lederer: Uh, no. I think I want to go back. Speaker #2: More? Susan Lederer : Yeah. That's it. Thank you. This is an example of the kinds of manuscript changes at the Journal of Experimental Medicine, to avoid anti-vivisectionist's criticism. Efforts to avoid criticism about large numbers of dogs used in experimentation encouraged the editorial staff to take somewhat different steps, that is, to renumber or relabel dog subjects. For example, in a 1932 paper on iron metabolism in dogs, Rous' assistant questioned whether the high dog numbers should appear in the published paper. There were references to 13 animals ranging from dog 75 to dog 1090. Rous proposed that decimals be inserted, but the pressure of a publication deadline led his assistant to renumber the animals consecutively from one to 13, a change that he later approved. In other cases, the staff inserted both letters and hyphens to "break up the numbers and prevent the anti-vivisectionists from quickly deducing the numbers of animals used". For example, instead of referring to a dog as dog 897, in the published paper, the dog would be referred to A8-97 and so on. Some writers attempted to minimize the use of the word dog altogether. In a 1938 paper, the editor instructed O.H. Robertson to substitute the word animal for dog four times in the headings of the paper on experimental canine lobar pneumonia. Responding to similar editorial suggestions, the surgeon [Elliot Cutler 00:22:44], proudly boasted to Rous, "you will note that we have taken great care to use the word dog almost never and have tried to cut down the possibility of any criticism being made by our enemies". These editorial policies were not limited to the Journal of Experimental Medicine. Manuscripts involving dog subjects submitted to the Annals of Surgery and to the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, for example, were also very closely reviewed for potential problems with anti-vivisectionists, and in some cases papers were rejected because authors had not used anesthesia in dog subjects and they wanted to avoid problems with them being abstracted in anti-vivisectionist pamphlets. The investment in these editorial policies was intended to diminish problems with the American anti-vivisectionists, but they did not eliminate the problems. Anti-vivisectionists continued to criticize the conditions under which animals were transported to laboratories and located by dealers. Aided by the Hearst newspaper chain, anti-vivisectionists sent agents to auctions in rural districts where dealers purchased dogs and cats for resale to laboratories. Stories about black auctions and reports of cruelty-to-animal convictions of dog dealers frequently appeared in the Hearst newspapers. This is a slide of William Randolph Hearst, whose newspaper chain consistently maintained a pro-antivivisectionist policy. To give you a flavor of some of these newspaper stories, this is a front-page story from the St. Louis Star Times showing a dog catcher catching a dog off the street that will later be resold to a laboratory. And, this, another front-page picture: The fate that could befall your dog if caught and sold to the laboratory. The support of the Hearst newspapers also facilitated the challenge to the use of pound animals in medical research. Now, in cities across America responsibility for lost or stray pets usually fell to humane societies, which cared for the growing number of abandoned animals. And as the pet population increased so did the number of strays. But as shelters could not afford to maintain the large numbers of animals indefinitely, most pound animals were usually destroyed. In some cities, medical schools were able to reach agreements with shelters to receive dogs and cats for a small fee. In St. Louis, for example, the area medical schools relied on such an arrangement for dogs. But when the management of the humane shelter, new management entered, they challenged this arrangement. And in 1921 deans of the various St. Louis Medical Schools organized a counteroffensive, a public hearing in the city council, and with a passage of a law ensuring that pound dogs would thereafter be sold to the medical school at a cost of 75 cents per animal. But not all medical schools succeeded as readily in reaching similar agreements. In the 1930s and 40s, anti-vivisectionists again attempted to outlaw the research use of any shelter animals. One of the most intense controversies occurred in California. Although the San Francisco pound killed an estimated 400 to 500 dogs and 1000 to 2000 cats per month, anti-vivisectionists refused to allow medical researchers access to this population. In 1938, supported by the Hearts newspaper chain, the Anti-Vivisectionist Society of California successfully garnered the necessary 187,000 signatures to place on the ballot an initiative that, if passed, would outlaw any use of pound animals in the state for either medical research or teaching. This threat to medical research from "middle-aged ladies disappointed in love" and "retired businessmen who had once read a Terhune dog story" galvanized the research community in California. Leaders of California's medical schools quickly revived a dormant defensive research group in order to persuade California voters of the necessity for continued access to stray animals. From the beginning of what turned out to be a very aggressive media campaign, the California Society for the Promotion of Medical Research worked to cultivate a more positive image of medical research, of medical experimentation involving dogs. The society appointed a state campaign director, an experienced newspaper man, who developed two strategies to defeat the proposed pound act. The first was a sentimental appeal employing the portrait of a wistful-appearing baby girl with the slogan, "I need your help. Safeguard my future health and welfare by voting no on number two." The second approach involved an appeal to instincts of self preservation, much more visceral: Kill number 2 or it will kill you. In addition to newspaper releases and print advertisements, the society blanketed the state with radio spots, leaflets and placards, windshield stickers against passage of the pound act. Commuters in the Ferry Building in San Francisco, for example, saw illuminated slides for both sides of this measure, both baby Gloria ... There she is - wistful-appearing baby girl, and this slide by the anti-vivisection societies of celebrity endorsement from Asta the dog from The Thin Man movies. But the state campaign director, however, was especially pleased with his one bit of trick advertising. He was able to get Asta's father to come out on the other side. Now, as Asta's presence suggests, the film community did become prominently involved in the pound-animal issue. Walt Disney, Basil Rathbone, Dolores del Rio, and Bette Davis, president of the Tailwaggers Foundation of America, all publicly endorsed passage of the state humane pound act. For their part, the leaders of the California medical establishment called on the president of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer asking that certain prominent male actors who had gained worldwide recognition because of the fact that they had played the part of doctors, and some of the most outstanding screen successes, be present at a public meeting opening the campaign against the pound initiative. Although, Louis B. Mayer failed to furnish Clark Gable and Robert Taylor, he did produce two motion picture shorts: "They Live Again" featuring the work of Banting and Best and the discovery of insulin and "Man's Greatest Friend" featuring Louis Pasteur's work on rabies, were shown at all theaters of the Fox West Coast Theatres Chain from October 18th through the election. California's medical leaders credited their victory on November 8, 1938, when the state humane pound act was defeated by a margin of 2:1, to the adroit use of visual images in the campaign against the state humane pound act. The battle had been won in California, but the war was far from over. In the 1940s, anti-vivisectionists' agitation on the pound animal issue escalated. The increase in war-related biomedical research programs intensified what had been a chronic shortage of dogs for laboratories. In cities like Chicago, where a local ordinance required the pound master to release dogs and cats to the medical schools, investigators experienced severe shortages and increased costs when the pound animals were no longer available. New ordinances in San Francisco, in Cleveland, Boston, Pennsylvania, and New York outlawed any release of pound animals to medical schools and several state legislatures were considering similar laws. In 1945, the New York State Senate actually passed a bill that would have prohibited any experimental use of dogs in the state of New York. A measure that was narrowly defeated in the House. This intensification of anti-vivisectionist activity in the 1940s led to the formation of a national research advocacy group, The National Society for Medical Research, which was organized under the auspices of the AAMC, the American Association of Medical Colleges. Led by the physiologist Anton Carlson and Andrew Ivy, this group aggressively lobbied legislators and the public for support of pound-seizure laws in order to stop the waste of millions of dogs and cats euthanized every year by animal shelters. In addition to radio and film programs on behalf of such pound-seizure laws they developed a comic book that emphasized the value of allowing pound animals to be used in medical research. A Medal for Bowzer, for example, was distributed to poor neighborhoods in the hope that children would take the comic book home to their parents. It, sort of, graphically told the reasons why pound animals should be made available to researchers. The NSMR did enjoy great success with this pound animal campaign. Beginning with Minnesota in 1949, many states did adopt pound-animal seizure laws making these stray animals available to research. But, I just want to point out, that animal experimenters sometimes drew an analogy between the problems they had with acquiring dogs to the clandestine arrangements that medical schools had to employ to obtain human cadavers before the passage of anatomical acts. But, unlike the anatomical acts, several of the pound-animal laws have since been revoked, such as New York's Hatch-Metcalf Act, which was passed as part of this NSMR campaign in 1952, repealed in 1979. Other states have followed New York's exampled and repealed these pound seizure laws. The NSMR also developed other strategies to counter the anti-vivisectionist gains. One of their activities was the pursuit of recognition for the dog subjects of medical experiments and revision of the public image of the medical scientists. In 1946, the NMSR established the Research Dog Hero Award, the canine version of the Nobel Prize following the lead of the Friends of Medical Research who in 1946 created the Whipple Prize "in tribute to dogs for outstanding service to humanities". The Research Dog Hero Award was given annually to a dog participant in experimental heart surgery or in cancer research. This is a slide of Josie and Trixie, two dogs from George Hoyt Whipple's laboratory at the University of Rochester, receiving their honorary dog collars from the Surgeon General of the United States Army at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. This is a slide of the research dog hero of 1955 and Harry Goldblatt and Irwin Haus. Flossie was nominated by the Cleveland Academy of Medicine and, in fact, had been acquired from a dog pound in Los Angeles. It was pointed out that Goldblatt was the only research scientist to come under enemy fire. He was actually shot at by an irate anti-vivisectionist in Los Angeles and was part of the reason he and his family chose to move to Cleveland. Dog heroes appeared at medical conventions, schools, and other media events and considerable care went into the release of the winners of the Research Dog Hero Awards. The announcement of the 1956 award to Airplane, a dog from Paul Dudley White's laboratory at Harvard Medical School, had to wait for a slow news day. The announcement of the award to this research dog from the laboratory of President Eisenhower's cardiologist was held up until after the World Series, after the election, and the Brink's robbery trial were past and there was space in the newspapers. Two years later in 1958 a research dog hero's disappearance before receiving his honorary dog collar was reported in newspapers around the country. After he had participated in experiments with brain perfusion at the Tulane Medical School, Big Ben was adopted by a New Orleans family, but before receiving the award he ran off. He was subsequently returned to his family and played a small, but significant, role in the New Orleans pound-seizure law controversy that also led to medical access to pound animals in that city. The Dog Hero Awards not only recognized the contributions of dogs to medical science, they were intended to humanize the image of medical scientists. That some researchers resented their treatment at the hands of anti-vivisectionists, I think, is suggested by this cartoon that appeared in the Journal clinical investigation in 1946. You have a woman labeling the doctor sadist and butcher, when at the same time they are trying to perform these acts to save soldiers and even to save the life of a wounded war dog. In a more sober vein, the NIH Surgery study section in 1946 expressed the hope that "frankness and candor will blow away the clouds of superstition and reveal the research scientist as a sympathetic, understanding human beings". Careful orchestration of the images of biomedical research involving animals was intended to address this problem. The NSMR helped to develop articles and photographic essays for magazines. In a 1952 issue of Collier's Magazine, for example, the physician Harold C. Wiggers posed with a pet dog he had brought home from the laboratory when its days as a research subject were over. But I think that the caption to this picture is particularly poignant. It said, "many doctors are animal lovers and some even get their pets from labs". This essay also included a photograph of Dr. Morris Barrett of the National Cancer Institute who, in his work at the NCI, conducted experiments on dogs but he was also a dog lover and he kept at home a rare Clumber Spaniel named Snooks. Also in this article were pictures of children who had been recipients of the newly-developed Blue Baby Operation shown with the dog on whom the operation had been perfected. This is a picture of Leslie Gildet and Marvin Mason and Anna the dog. And sometimes these children actually testified at pound-seizure law hearings, not only in Baltimore but in other cities. Images have always played an important role in the controversy over animal experimentation. Several historians have argued, in fact, that a critical factor in the passage of the first federal legislation regulating laboratory animal welfare was a photo spread in Life Magazine depicting the poor conditions of puppy mills that supplied research laboratories and the unscrupulous animal suppliers that dealt in stolen pets. I think you can see Life took a very strong editorial stance. This was the title of the article, "Concentration Camps for Dogs", and several photographs showing the conditions under which dogs were kept, the poor conditions of some of the animals on hand; "Efforts to Prevent Dognapping by Unscrupulous Animal Dealers"; and "A Happy Ending", three pets that had been stolen but were returned safely to their owners. The initial legislation of 1966 regulated the activities of animal suppliers and stopped at the laboratory door. But in the years since 1966 the act has been amended and now governs all aspects of the acquisition, care, maintenance, and even exercise of dogs in laboratories. But if the regulation of clinical investigation involving human subjects is any indication, it's more likely that we will see increasing regulation of animal experimentation rather than any return to the laissez-faire policies of the first half of the 20th century. Thank you.