Activists Face 10 Years In Prison After Rescuing 18 Beagle Puppies From Animal Testing Lab

Animal Rebellion is urging the public to take action after it rescued beagle puppies from an MBR Acres animal testing breeding facility in Cambridgeshire in the UK.

It freed 18 in total, but two more – named Love and Libby – were seized by the police. The group has set up an online petition calling for the animals to be released to a sanctuary. 

According to rescuers, Love and Libby are now considered “contaminated property.” They will either be killed or given back to the industry unless they are released. 

You can sign the petition here

Animal Rebellion claims this is the biggest open rescue to ever happen in the UK. Activists potentially face up to 10 years in prison for their actions. 

“We rescued as many dogs as we could so they can live a long happy life with loving families,” Dan Kidby, co-founder of Animal Rebellion, told Plant Based News (PBN). “The rescuers then handed themselves in to face a trial by jury to give the general public the opportunity to find us not guilty and deal a devastating blow to the animal testing industry.”

The rescue

In the early hours of this morning (Tuesday, December 20), 12 Animal Rebellion supporters entered the MBR Acres dog breeding facility. 

The company is hugely controversial, and celebrities including Ricky Gervais and Will Young have previously slammed it. Beagles are bred for biomedical research, meaning the puppies rescued were destined for a life of being used in animal experiments. MBR breeds around 2,000 beagles a year, and sells them on for testing both in the UK and abroad.

Before being sold, they are kept in “horrific” conditions for around 16 weeks, Animal Rebellion says. Its investigators found dogs in cages playing in their own excrement and desperately trying to interact with rescuers. 

The group wore t-shirts that said “Put Animal Testing On Trial” and “What Would You Do If This Was Your Dog?”. 

Dog testing in the UK

Animal testing is big business in the UK, and much of the public have no idea that experiments routinely use dogs. 

In 2021, 4,277 regulated tests were carried out on dogs in the UK. Of those, 4,016 were beagles. All of these experiments were approved by the UK government.

Beagles are used for tests because they are small and docile, meaning they are relatively easy to exploit. 

Dogs are often used for toxicity testing, which sees them force-fed or injected with chemicals. If they don’t die from the poison, they may be killed by asphyxiation so that researchers can conduct autopsies. 

Do animal tests work?

Animal testing has been repeatedly shown to be unreliable, as well as cruel. 

Around three million tests are carried out on animals each year in the UK. Approximately 90 percent of tests found to be safe for animals go on to fail in human trials. 

Cruelty Free International, which campaigns against animal testing globally, says there are a number of viable alternatives available. These include the use of cell cultures, human tissue, and computer models.

“Animal Rebellion is calling for the end to animal testing,” Kidby told PBN. “So we as a society can live up to our values as a nation of animal lovers.”

You can sign another petition to shut down MBR Acres here.

The post Activists Face 10 Years In Prison After Rescuing 18 Beagle Puppies From Animal Testing Lab appeared first on Plant Based News.

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