i want a beagle

I'll probably spend the rest of the day obsessing about these dogs:



I've always thought beagles were cute, but I had no idea their dispositions made them ideal for lab testing :(  Makes me sad.  Seems so wrong to treat dogs this way.

It doesn't bother me to think of rats and mice being kept in cages and having experiments conducted on them.  I think it goes back to my Rat Lab days.  I was a psychology major, and in one of my behavioral classes we had to teach our rat how to press a lever to get a  drink of water.  At the end of the semester I had to decide Sunny's fate.

He was a good rat and caught on to the whole lever thing quickly.  When the class was over, I didn't want to give him to the zoo for snake food.  My professor felt that the rats had been bred specifically for this purpose, and once they'd served that purpose, it was perfectly acceptable to let zoo animals make a meal of them.

Some students found homes for their rats or, like me, ended up taking them home as a pet.  Having a rat for a pet was not ideal.  Sunny was an escape artist and he could chew through anything!  I bought him a ball so that he could run around the house, but he always got himself stuck in corners.  I had him for about a year, then one day he escaped while I was cleaning his cage :(

I probably should have given him to the snakes.  Instead he was probably eaten by whatever vicious creatures that lived in our backyard.  Poor Sunny.

Anyway, I think that using beagles as lab animals is sad because I've never thought of them as anything other than pets.  It's easy to see them bonding to humans in that way.  Rats and mice, on the other hand, make me think of garbage and the plague.  In any case, is animal testing on one type of animal more acceptable than others?  Not really :(