Congress: ‘Bite Back’ Against Beagle Abusers, PETA Says
For Immediate Release:
April 26, 2022
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
A new full-page PETA ad in today’s edition of The Hill calls on members of Congress to join Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner in pushing the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to suspend the license of Envigo’s Cumberland, Virginia, facility—a beagle-breeding factory farm that supplies laboratories and has racked up 73 federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA) violations since July 2021. The plea follows a damning PETA undercover investigation into Envigo and the recent passage of five animal protection bills in Virginia aimed at helping dogs confined to the facility.
The ad quotes a letter from the two senators to Kevin Shea, administrator of the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, condemning Envigo’s “repeated failures” to provide dogs and puppies with adequate care as well as the abuse that led to their distress, injury, and death.
“Dogs at Envigo are born into barren cages, subjected to painful procedures, and then sold to laboratories to be experimented on,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA is calling on all members of Congress to do their part to prevent this cruelty from continuing.”
The ad informs readers that Envigo’s AWA violations include killing conscious puppies via excruciatingly painful injections into the heart; denying dozens of dogs treatment for severe dental disease and traumatic wounds; neglecting damp, shivering, and cold puppies; and allowing numerous serious dogfights to occur in the presence of the inspectors. From January to July 2021, the deaths of over 300 puppies were attributed to unknown causes—but no effort was made to determine what those causes were in order to prevent similar deaths.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
