PETA Accuses NIH Of Buying Beagles From VA Facility Cited By USDA

CUMBERLAND, VA — A Virginia dog breeding facility that supplies beagles to the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries has been cited by federal regulators for multiple animal welfare violations after hundreds of puppies died in the filthy, putrid, insect-infested conditions over a seven-month span.

The charges against Indianapolis-based Envigo stem from the findings in a surprise visit last summer by inspectors with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal Plant Health Inspection Service to the facility at Cumberland, Virginia, about 50 miles west of Richmond.

At the same time, the animal rights group PETA has taken aim at the National Institutes of Health for contracting with Envigo for beagles for its research.

According to federal records, the company and Convance, which it acquired, have fulfilled at least $1.2 million in NIH contracts for live dogs.

Envigo houses about 5,000 beagles at the Cumberland campus, in operation since 1961. The company claims in an online brochure that its programs are designed around animal welfare, that dogs have room to run and enrichment is a top priority.

The USDA inspectors painted a much different picture of the Envigo beagle breeding facility, The Washington Post reported.

Inspectors said the facility’s records were incomplete and indicted the puppies died of “unknown causes,” but that 500 more puppies and dogs kept inside a building with an un-air-conditioned temperature of 85 degrees were experiencing “discomfort, lethargy or stress.”

At least a dozen dogs were sick with eye infections, “severe dental disease” and inflamed paws, the inspectors noted, while also raising concerns the whelping area were infrequently cleaned, and nursing puppies could be exposed to disease and sickness.

An Envigo spokesman told The Washington Post it is working with USDA to correct the problems noted in the inspection report, adding, “The highest quality of animal welfare is a core value of our company.”

The USDA did not fine Envigo, The Hill reported for its "Changing America" reporting series.

Separately, PETA said an undercover investigation found the dogs led meaningless lives with no way to escape cramped sheds where their barking was louder than a rock concert, causing them to fight an injure each other.

The facility operated like a puppy mill with little regard for dogs’ health, according to the organization, formerly known as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

“A supervisor found one pregnant dog afflicted with a fever. The next day, a worker found her ‘dead — like stiff as a board,’ with two puppies in her and … they had torn through her uterus [and] were just kind of floating around in her abdomen,” an undercover investigator noted. “So all like … the afterbirth … was all … in her stomach. And I think that just led to a massive infection.”

PETA investigators also noted workers who lack veterinary credentials stuck needles into puppies’ heads to drain hematomas without giving them anything for the pain, and also instances in which puppies “fell through holes in the cages and ended up in drains, soaked with water, feces and other waste.”

“If the puppies at Envigo survive being born into a barren cage, blasted with a high-pressure hose, and being subjected to painful procedures, they’re sold to laboratories to be experimented on,” PETA Senior Vice President of Cruelty Investigations Daphna Nachminovitch wrote in a blog post last month. “These beagles experience exactly the same feelings of fear, pain, and loneliness as the dogs who share our homes can, and none of them should suffer in the experimentation business.”

Envigo defended its use of animals for research as “essential for developing lifesaving medicines, medical devices and biologics, such as vaccines.”

Research animals have “an integral role in the development of advanced pacemakers for heart patients” and are “critical” in research into Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis, a company spokesperson told The Washington Post.

Beagles are ideal research animals, according to animal research experts, because they are small and docile. A spokesperson for the NIH told The Post it has no plans to purchase more research beagles from Envigo.

PETA said it appears from published research that other institutions have acquired research animals from Envigo or Covance, including:

• Temple University in Philadelphia, where a spokesman told The Post it was “committed to the care and humane treatment of research animals,” but declined to talk specifically about the contract.
• The Medical University of South Carolina, whose spokesperson told The Post was aware of the problems at the Cumberland facility, but said it hadn’t used research animals on its campus since 2017.
• Virginia Tech, whose spokesperson said the veterinary college had purchased dogs from Envigo’s Cumberland facility, but stopped doing so in 2020, although it had accepted some donated animal cadavers this fall.
• North Carolina State University, where a spokesperson said six dogs purchased from Envigo for research “all were in good health” and were put up for adoption when the research ended.