Owner of Notorious Beagle Supplier Has a New Shareholder: PETA

Purchase Follows Group’s Exposé of Envigo Revealing That Hundreds of Dogs Died, Some Were Left to Rot

For Immediate Release:
December 15, 2021

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Today, PETA announced its recent purchase of stock in Inotiv, the new parent company of Envigo—a Virginia-based international dog breeder and supplier to laboratories—which is currently fielding fallout from a damning PETA undercover exposé as well as a subsequent U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) investigation. PETA’s stock purchase allows the group to attend Inotiv’s annual meetings and address the board of directors and shareholders directly about Envigo’s abuse of dogs and many serious violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act. PETA is also calling on the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care International to revoke Envigo’s accreditation. The National Institutes of Health is one of Envigo’s customers.

Envigo confines some 5,000 beagles to barren kennels and cramped cages in football field–size sheds, breeds the mothers twice a year for up to seven years, and produces as many as 500 puppies each month to sell for experimentation. PETA’s investigation revealed that workers with no veterinary credentials stuck needles into puppies’ heads; injected euthanasia drugs directly into puppies’ hearts without sedation, causing them immense pain; deprived nursing mother dogs of food for up to two days; sprayed dogs with high-pressure hoses, leaving them drenched; and caused dogs to suffer in other ways.

“Gentle beagles are suffering at Envigo, and those who survive are sent to laboratories to endure even more pain and misery,” says PETA Vice President of Evidence Analysis Dan Paden. “Now, as an owner of stock in Envigo’s parent company, PETA will have a direct line to board members and shareholders to urge them to shut down this hellhole and throw away the key.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—plans to push Inotiv to adopt its Research Modernization Deal, which offers a strategy for ending archaic and flawed experiments on animals and supporting modern, effective, human-relevant research methods—such as organs-on-a-chip, three-dimensional tissue models, and supercomputers for drug screening and modeling.

Photos from PETA’s investigation are available here, and video footage is available here.

PETA opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.