Unidentified woman with a beagle (ca. 1950s) | Honoré Desmond Sharrer / Honoré Sharrer papers, ca. 1920–2007, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution / Public domain
In recent months, activists against animal testing in scientific experiments have had a few moments of important success. In December, the National Defense Authorization Act included a provision that military funding will not be spent on projects that require painful research on dogs or cats (unless they are military service animals, or the Secretary of Defense declares an exception). And in January, the Environmental Protection Agency followed suit, announcing a plan to end all EPA-funded animal testing by 2035. Activists with influential followings on social media have been carrying the flag of partial victory.
Given the popular conception of animal advocates as either sentimental tree-huggers or radical leftist ecoterrorists, readers may be surprised by who is leading this charge—the American far right. Laura Loomer, conspiratory-theorist and advisor to the president, has been front and center in the campaign to end NIH- and Pentagon-funded animal research. Arizona representative Paul Gosar (perhaps best known for his on-again-off-again support for neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes) has collaborated with White Coat Waste Project, boasting successes in ending government-funded projects. Even Ann Coulter, former Fox News staple now struggling to maintain relevance, has gotten in on the act.
As Brad Bolman points out in his conclusion to Lab Dog: What Global Science Owes American Beagles(University of Chicago Press, 2025), ending animal testing has been a component of the conservative hardliner’s playbook for a while, but as a contemporary political tactic it owes more to antipathy for public-funded science than it does enthusiasm for animal welfare. The founder of the White Coat Waste Project formerly “developed PR campaigns against Obamacare and Planned Parenthood”; Matt Gaetz, who cosponsored a bill nominally aimed at ending painful experiments on “respected species,” argued for fully “eliminating public science funding.” Much of the rhetoric currently being employed repurposes right-wing critiques against Anthony Fauci’s COVID-19 recommendations as arguments against his involvement in animal experimentation.
For Loomer, Gosar, Coulter, and Gaetz, the animal that garners special concern is the beagle, the small black-and-tan hound dog that has become a powerful avatar of an innocent, nostalgic, vague American-ness. They are vulnerable beings in need of protection, and according to this cadre, such protection requires drastically rolling back perceived government overreach. But how did the beagle become such a potent national symbol, and how did it become the research dog of choice for American scientists? These are the questions that animate Lab Dog.
Lab Dog is a meticulously researched history that illustrates how economic, political and social shifts throughout the twentieth century impact not just how beagles are utilized in scientific research but also raises more fundamental questions. How do we determine what constitutes a healthy dog? What traits, if any, are immutable within the breed? What even is a beagle, anyway? One of Bolman’s strengths is demonstrating how these shifts in scientific research are affected by larger structures outside of their purview, such as geopolitical upheavals, economic fluctuation and cultural transformations. This approach places his research in conversation with foundational science studies such as Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions andBruno Latour’s Science and Action, texts that demonstrated that even so-called objective knowledge was subject to shifts in political, social, and economic topographies. As Bolman writes in his introduction, “The history of biology … is already a history of forms of capital,” and Lab Dog demonstrates how American defense projects, tobacco companies, eugenicist philanthropists, and pharmaceutical giants took advantage of (and in some cases actively manufactured) these shifts in material and intellectual production, all with the help of expendable beagles.
Bolman, then, is interested not just in the crucial and controversial role beagles played in American scientific development but the social and political history of how beagles came to assume this role, stretching back to their introduction to the continent in the 1870s. Nineteenth century overhunting of birds required northeastern hunters to find a new target—rabbits—and along with their new prey, a new dog to chase them down. English beagles, having been bred in Britain specifically for this kind of hunt, were the natural fit. Next came the formation of the first American group of beagle aficionados, the American English Beagle Club; by 1890, only seven years after its inception, the group proclaimed that the beagles bred by American breeders were superior to their English counterparts, dropped “English” from the name, and thus fused the image of the beagle with the image of American values. This identification intensified in the 1930s, when isolationists in congress passed laws that made the importation of foreign dogs especially onerous. A new market for domestic breeding emerged, and American beagle production flourished. Bolman argues that during World War II, popular hunting magazines painted the beagle hunt as an exercise in American freedom, casting beagle ownership as a small, domestic victory over the Axis powers, as well as a therapeutic activity for returning soldiers. One 1945 war bonds ad depicted “a man who saves and invests in war bonds to eventually open the beagle kennel of his dreams” as an emblem of financial savvy. Additionally, the midcentury explosion of car ownership made beagle hunts and dog agility trials a viable activity for suburban families. All of these shifts in the American physical and political landscape—the overconsumption of natural resources, the crafting of a postwar American identity (both domestic and international), the emergence of American isolationism, the explosion of car manufacturing—combined to make the beagle America’s most popular dog in 1954.
By the time beagles became a metonym for the suburban American lifestyle, scientists had already taken note, prizing the breed for the same reasons as pet owners—their amiable nature, their availability, and their proximity to a presumed notion of “normality.” This question of normality is one of the most potent and productive themes in Lab Dog. Throughout, Bolan demonstrates how beagles have been rendered an analogy for a “normal” (that is, able-bodied, white, usually male) American citizen when it is expedient for the scientists to do so.
Early research utilizing beagles, beginning in the 1920s, aimed to legitimize eugenicist beliefs about the dangers of “crossbreeding” (resulting in an experiment so distressing one researcher described it as “a nightmare dog show”) and the inheritability of intelligence. The operative sense of “normal human life” present in these experiments is thus related to a presumed natural hierarchy of not just species but races. Later, in the Atomic Age, scientists tested multiple scenarios of what “normal life” would look like in the future. In these experiments, some populations of beagles were exposed to the same amounts of radium that nuclear plant workers would encounter, while others were fed daily doses of strontium-90, which would circulate under dystopian fallout conditions. (The strontium-90 trials on beagles, it should be noted, began only after scientists had stopped testing plutonium and uranium on terminally ill patients, “many of whom gave questionable consent to participate.” These scientists anticipated that a radioactive planet would constitute a “normal” state of affairs, underscoring that normality is never a given, but always the product of a constructed ideology. Bolman argues that our view of beagles, too, is a product of the ideologies that underlie our pursuit of scientific exploration. While one might imagine that animals used in scientific experiments come ready-made for the endeavor, this is not the case, and Bolman details how beagles “required assistance in becoming normal … They were also understood to be tools, and debates about normal and abnormal aging underlined the fabrication of their nature.” For instance, outside of lab settings, the average beagle was becoming heavier, which may not be a problem for a pet owner; however, in the lab, such variation could complicate the process of replicating studies. Thus, scientists determined “two optimum variants” for an adult beagle (one male, one female), and implemented strict, controlled measures to assure this “normal” size was achieved.
The vexed question of how a “normal beagle” relates to a “normal human” is best exemplified by the landmark—and macabre—smoking tests conducted from the 1950s to 1970s. By the time these experiments were conducted, researchers were already fairly convinced of the link between smoking and ill health, including cancer, but lacked the data to prove causality. So researchers decided to get beagles addicted to nicotine in order to study growth of cancerous tissue. In some tests, beagles were fixed with a mask which would pump smoke into their snouts; in others, beagles underwent tracheotomies so that cigarette smoke could be poured directly into their throats, bypassing the need for cumbersome headgear. In each, beagles seem to behave much like human smokers—once exposed, they indicated a desire for cigarettes by rushing to the testing apparatuses, and they became withdrawn and irritable when they went too long without a smoke. Then they developed cancer.
The cancer growths were the expected and even hoped-for outcome, allowing researchers to finally put a stamp of causality on the link between smoking and adverse health, but the pleasure the beagles got from smoking was a surprise. As Bolan notes, seeing dogs “puffing happily away” puts pressure on the delineations of certain species’ capacities, like pleasure, indulgence, vice. When confronted with such similarities, it may be the case that our image of the other species is elevated and we declare, “They’re just like us!” But it also can threaten the inverse, a demotion of our own standing that forces us to concede, “We’re just like them.” The tobacco companies made use of this infringement into human supremacy, arguing that the results were invalid because the dogs simply could not smoke like humans. In other words, because the coercive conditions of the laboratory were nothing like the leisurely environs in which humans light up, the conclusions must say more about how beagles respond to lab conditions than how humans respond to cigarettes. Despite the tobacco lobby’s vociferous campaign to undermine and bury the research, history would prove the researchers correct—both “normal” beagles and “normal” humans become addicted to and suffer from prolonged exposure to cigarettes.
Lab Dog’s strength lies in tracing how the conception of beagles—and their human counterparts—shifted throughout the twentieth century, illuminating how the Gordian knot of capitalism, technology, national defense, and corporate interest guides these shifts. What is at stake in these experiments is not just the potential scientific discovery (though, it must be noted, such discoveries are excruciatingly rare), but what our society takes “normal” to mean, and what we want it to be. Animal activists on the Left—the Animal Liberation Front, Animal Rising, and Direct Action Everywhere, to name a few—have been at the forefront of highlighting the abnormality of animal exploitation: how it flagrantly contradicts our intuitions about animal suffering; how it desensitizes those who administer the exploitation as well as those who benefit from it; how it conjures normalcy out of violence. For these reasons, it is disappointing that, outside of the concluding pages, Bolman does not address the concerns or work of animal activists or critical animal theorists more directly. Even if the broader history of the animal justice movement is outside the scope of the text, considering their claims could have resulted in fruitful questions. For instance, the famed “brown dog riots” of the early twentieth century pitted English vivisectionists against a coalition of animal advocates, suffragists, and the working poor—all of whom identified, in one way or another, to the plight of the animals forced to undergo painful experimentation.
Looking back at the coalition formed during the brown dog riots throws the political shadow game of the current surge of right-wing support for the abolition of scientific experiments on animals into sharp relief. If the brown dog riots advocated for the recovery of a certain kind of normalcy that emphasized shared interests across species, class, and gender lines, the ultraconservatives in today’s movement are taking a very different tack. They advocate for abolition in the name of a normalcy that traffics in xenophobia, racism, and American exceptionalism.
But as Lab Dog demonstrates, there is no monopoly on what constitutes a normal relationship with animals. While conservative activists are correct in their stated claim that lab experiments on beagles, and all animals, should end, this position does not require a reactionary retreat to the noxious antiscience policies and positions of the far right, which instrumentalize the image of vulnerable animals to stoke fear of immigrants. Instead, the movement for animal justice should be viewed as repairing the ideological distortions that have made animals—and many humans—subject to exactly these violent instrumentalizing hierarchies. Such an approach requires viewing animal justice in relation to other forms of racial, economic, gender and disability justice. Realizing, for example, that the employees of contemporary American slaughterhouses—disproportionately undocumented men, subjected to inhumane working conditions, and with few legal options for confronting their employers—are subjugated by the same violent structures as the animals they are hired to kill. Such work is currently being undertaken by Claire Jean Kim, Dinesh Wadiwel, Syl Ko, and Sunaura Taylor, to name a few. While such work is absent from Bolman’s historical account, the structures that created the modern beagle illustrate how the fight for animal justice cannot be isolated from other liberatory movements.
