Animal rights campaigners set up a protest camp at a “factory farm” that breeds puppies for laboratory experiments after comedy actor Ricky Gervais launched a campaign to ban all tests on animals in the UK.
The protesters said they wanted to close down the site in Cambridgeshire, which breeds beagles that are sold when they are 16 weeks old for chemicals and drugs testing.
The centre denied claims that it trains the puppies to be “laboratory-ready”, including offering a paw for injections and accepting paper cups on their faces, ready for wearing gas masks.
Gervais and fellow actor Peter Egan are lobbying against all animal experimentation and calling for laboratory animals to be included in the Animal Welfare Act, which outlaws causing animal suffering.
Activists who monitored the breeding site at Huntingdon for more than a year described “harrowing” scenes. Gervais said: “I’m deeply shocked to learn that thousands of beautiful beagles are intensively bred, right here in the peace of the British countryside, for painful and terrifying toxicity experiments that are also now proven to entirely fail the search for human treatments and cures.” Mel Broughton, of the Free the MBR Beagles campaign, said: “Increasingly, there is scientific opinion that these experiments are not valid in terms of finding cures for human diseases, and these dogs suffer greatly in toxicity tests. They’re poisoned to death slowly.”(Independent)
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