Lab Dog:  A Beagle & His Human Investigate, by Melanie D.G. Kaplan

Lab Dog:  A Beagle & His Human Investigate the Surprising World of Animal Research

by Melanie D.G. Kaplan

Seal Press
352 pages
$32.00 hardcover;  $18.99 ebook.
Order online:  https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/melanie-d-g-kaplan/lab-dog/9781541604988/?lens=seal-press

Reviewed by Merritt Clifton

Perhaps the best way to start a review of Lab Dog:  A Beagle & His Human Investigate the Surprising World of Animal Research,by Melanie D.G. Kaplan,  is to compare and contrast an October 6,  2025 pre-publication review by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals staff writer Melissa Sanger,  with what author Melanie D.G. Kaplan herself had to say in the book about her findings.

“When journalist Melanie D. G. Kaplan adopted a timid beagle named Hamilton—“Hammy” for short—she had no idea how profoundly he would change her life,”  began Sanger.

“Hammy,  underweight and with quiet brown eyes, had spent his early years in a desolate cage at a massive Virginia breeding facility—later obtained and operated by Envigo—that sold dogs to laboratories.  Like thousands of others,”  Sanger wrote,  “they treated him as little more than a number tattooed in his ear,  robbed of his voice when they cut his vocal cords,  and destined for painful experiments.”

Lab Dog,  Sanger summarized,  “is part memoir,  part investigation into the hidden world of animal testing.  She explores the cruelty of breeding operations,  the callousness of laboratory life,  and the resilience of dogs who somehow learn to trust again.”

Questioning

Most of this is true,  but as Kaplan explains on page 258 of the 315 pages of actual narrative text,  “I had no reason to think Hammy’s vocal cords were cut.  His bark,  once he was confident enough to share it,  had always been robust.

“Soon,”  Kaplan continues,  I began questioning other things I’d heard or read about Hammy’s circumstances.  For example,  local TV coverage of the DC7 rescue [from which Kaplan adopted Hammy] included a quote from the Beagle Freedom Project:  ‘They’ve never been outside or seen the sun.’  But now I’d heard from several people at Virginia Tech,”  where Hammy had done his laboratory time,  “including former students,  faculty,  and former faculty,  that both the research and teaching dogs had their own harnesses and were taken to an outdoor run behind the school.  I don’t doubt for a second that some dogs in laboratories never feel grass under their paws,  but I was doubting more and more that this was ever the case with Hammy,”  whose laboratory name was Gator,  not just a tattooed number.

“I felt duped”

Reviewing the mountain of information Kaplan gathered over the preceding years about Hammy’s origins and use,  and the histories of the other DC7 dogs,  Kaplan finds “The resentment that bubbled up looking at this marketing message caught me off guard.  For years I’d trusted Beagle Freedom Project.  I’d parroted their lines to friends,  strangers,  and schoolchildren.  I was reluctant to criticize or question the organization that brought Hammy into my life,  but now I felt duped.

“Certainly,”  Kaplan acknowledges,  as one who made extraordinary effort to find out,  “it is difficult to know what goes on behind laboratory doors:  even the industry admits it has done a poor job of being open and frank with the public and media.  The facts around this controversial topic are hard to find and even harder to digest.

“But why do organizations amp up the facts in a way that sparks distrust?  Would people not support the cause if they knew ending animal testing would take more than just shopping cruelty-free?  Or if they realized the issue was far more nuanced than good guys and bad guys?  Or if they understood these dogs sometimes did receive a gentle touch in the labs?  That some had names?”

Answers

The answers to Kaplan’s questions are unfortunately,  in order,  a defense of necessity,  yes,  yes,  and yes.

Animal advocacy organizations “amp up the facts in a way that sparks distrust,”  and pro-biomedical research groups do much the same thing from the opposite direction,  because extreme claims raise funds much more effectively than moderation.

Further,  few segments of society have learned more from vivisectors including Ivan Pavlov and B.F. Skinner than the animal advocacy fundraising sector,  as ANIMALS 24-7 has observed and heard directly from several of the most successful fundraisers serving the cause.

Once a donor base is conditioned to respond to a particular appeal message,  updating the message tends to undo the conditioning,  resulting in lower and less lucrative response.

Biomedical researchers play the same game

Biomedical researchers play the same game in their grant applications.

Changing the pitch tends to confuse funders and slow the arrival of grants,  so applicants tend to introduce as few new elements to each application as possible.

Further of note,  as the recent and ongoing Envigo and Ridglan laboratory beagle-breeding episodes illustrate,  beagles bred for laboratory use may often endure harsher conditions and treatment among the hundreds of others in what are essentially just specialized puppy mills,  than as individual specimens or members of small research colonies at their end destinations.

Beagles,  other than breeding females,  typically spend only weeks to several months at a breeding facility,  but often spend many months to years under observation in a research colony,  with much opportunity for being befriended by lab technicians who find chores such as cage-cleaning much easier with dogs who look forward to their visits.

(See Covance beagle breeding kennels: they are not Snoopy’s doghouse;  Why the USDA cannot effectively enforce the Animal Welfare Act;  4,500+ beagles freed from laboratory use by judge’s order;  The Envigo beagle case: loose ends & lessons for animal advocates;  Judge orders special prosecutor to probe beagle breeder Ridglan Farms;  and Did the Ridglan beagles win in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election?)

Ann Cottrell Free & Henry Spira

Tracing the evolution of protest and legislation pertaining to animal use in biomedical research,  especially pertaining to beagles,  Melanie D.G. Kaplan reviews several recent decades of relevant history.

Among a multitude of sources personally familiar to ANIMALS 24-7,  Kaplan discusses the contributions of former fellow journalists Ann Cottrell Free (1916-2004) and Henry Spira (1927-1998),  the latter now considered more-or-less the founding father of the modern animal rights movement.

Deals Spira brokered with the corporate world to refine,  reduce,  and ultimately replace animal testing with non-animal methods are still honored.

Further,  as Kaplan explores,  those deals and the reasoning behind them have for more than forty years been increasingly influential in biomedical research protocols among the Generation X,  Millennial,  and Post-Millennial generations of scientists.

Psychological scars

The militant hostility,  infiltration,  espionage,  and disruption funded by corporate animal users that late 20th century opponents of biomedical research routinely encountered now seem to be history.

Also mostly history is the violence waged against laboratories and individual researchers by entities such as the so-called Animal Liberation Front [ALF] and Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty [SHAC],  especially in the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the present century.

Unfortunately,  Kaplan finds,  the psychological scars left by ALF and SHAC terrorism remain prevalent among the many biomedical researchers she interviews and attempts to interview.  Those who talk with her mostly insist on anonymity.

Both Free and Spira,  now mostly forgotten,  were in their later years among ANIMALS 24-7‘s very best sources.

Tactics today

ANIMALS 24-7 could not say the same for Hans Ruesch (1913-2007),  whose sensational anti-vivisection screeds were often factually shaky and sometimes far outdated even when newly published.

Yet it is Ruesch more than Free and Spira whose style has come to dominate anti-vivisection advocacy.

(See Fauci vs. the White Coat Waste Project: did Hans Ruesch sire the conflict?)

The aggressively personal approach of the White Coat Waste Project in particular,  reminiscent of Ruesch,  probably whets the anxiety of biomedical researchers more than direct memories of anything that the ALF and SHAC actually did,  almost all of it more than 20 years ago.

“Intimidated by the subject matter”

Much of Lab Dog involves Melanie D.G. Kaplan’s struggle not only to find out the complete story of her beloved Hammy,  but to discover the bigger stories behind that story.

Explained Kaplan in an October 12,  2025 pre-publication interview with ethologist and Psychology Today blogger Marc Bekoff,  “I set off on this journey in 2021 feeling pretty intimidated by the subject matter.

“I’ve worked as an independent journalist for almost 30 years and while I’ve written many stories about science and animals,  I’m not a scientist,”  Kaplan acknowledged.   “I barely remember high school biology.  I knew this would involve digging deep into a complicated—and controversial—subject.

“So I read dozens of books, learned how to make my way through a scientific paper and then tried to write in a way that I hope is accessible to lay readers.  The book also involved a lot of road trips with a beagle.  If I’m a subject matter expert in anything,  it’s that.

“The troubled middle”

“In Lab Dog,”  Kaplan resumed to Bekoff,  “I explore the history of using dogs for biomedical research and testing products,  including drugs,  medical devices,  and pesticides.

“I also look at the use of dogs in the classroom over the years.  They were used regularly in med schools until recent decades and are still used in many veterinary schools.”

Most significantly,  Kaplan said,  “I also discuss what is known as the ‘troubled middle,’  a term coined by philosopher Strachan Donnelley in his 1989 piece Speculative Philosophy,  the Troubled Middle, and the Ethics of Animal Experimentation.  Donnelley writes about the two extremes in animal research and those who ‘recognize the legitimate and often conflicting needs and requirements of both human and animal welfare.’  It is this group in the troubled middle,  Donnelley says,  who are ‘most truly vexed by ethical questions.’

“The Good Research”

Kaplan proceeds from immersion in the worlds of advocacy and beagle rescue,  to the point of participating in the Envigo beagle evacuation and spending weeks volunteering at the Kindness Ranch sanctuary for former research animals in Colorado,  to “one chapter called ‘The ‘Good’ Research,’”  she summarized for Bekoff,   “which explores the use of pet dogs for clinical trials.

“I like this chapter,”  Kaplan said,  “because it looks at a way to continue research,  often looking at repurposing existing drugs,  without breeding dogs specifically for that purpose and keeping them confined in labs.  These trials sometimes help future generations of pets and humans and may even help the pet in the trial.”

What Kaplan did not mention to Bekoff,  however,  but does discuss in that Lab Dog chapter,  are the inherent limitations on use of pet dogs that oblige many researchers using this approach to use purpose-bred beagles as well,  including to avoid the complications that inevitably result from using test subjects of differing genetic background and individual life histories.

“Balanced approach”

Concluded Kaplan in her discussion with Bekoff,  “I hope Lab Dog presents a more balanced approach and shares the stories of the book’s characters in such a way that the reader understands the nuances.

“From the get-go,”  Kaplan admits,  “I knew I might find that people on both sides of this debate were ‘right.’  I don’t see this as a story of good and evil,  angels and monsters.  I see this as a story of people who genuinely believe they are doing the right thing by fighting against animal testing and working to find cures for diseases through animal research.”

Contrary to the Hollywood disaster movie maxim that “the dog survives,”  Hammy the former research beagle dies in the final pages from a cancer that is essentially a common condition of age.

Before that,  Kaplan investigates possible treatments and,  one suspects,  largely motivated by anticipation of grief,  pursues something she calls “restorative justice” on behalf of Hammy and other dogs,  indeed perhaps all other animals,  used in biomedical research.

That goes nowhere,  except perhaps into self-discovery.  But it is part of the story,  not only of Hammy and Melanie D.G. Kaplan,  but of how humans in general are evolving in attitudes toward animals,  from seeing them as mostly just objects for our use,  to recognizing them as sentient beings.

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