We woke in Boston before daybreak as usual, and Hammy — my beagle, who was once a lab dog used in research — stretched, a squeak escaping from his yawn. I prepared my oatmeal and served him breakfast, then we bundled up and headed to Boston Common to meet Larry Carbone, who was then a visiting fellow at the Harvard Law School Animal Law and Policy Program.
The Common, considered the country’s oldest park, has been an important space for public assembly for centuries: On that land, George Washington celebrated the nation’s independence, women’s suffragists held rallies, and Charles Lindbergh inspired crowds with visions of the future of commercial aviation. (A few years after his celebrated transatlantic flight, in 1927, Lindbergh conducted animal experiments at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, now the Rockefeller University, in New York. He worked with Nobel Prize winner Alexis Carrel, the transplant pioneer who proved that kidney transplantation — at least between dogs — was possible. The unlikely pair, both staunch eugenicists seeking the key to immortality, designed a perfusion pump, which is used today to keep organs alive during transport; they used an early version to exhibit a dog’s thyroid at the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens.)
Advertisement
In the park, Hammy and I crossed a bridge over the lagoon to find Carbone. I scanned the surrounding skyline — the hospitals, universities, pharmaceutical companies — and thought about the effort that went into making the world of animal experimentation invisible. What if we had X-ray vision? I wondered. What if heat sensors could show all the animals tucked away in city buildings? I thought back to a time shortly after I adopted Hammy, when our friend Dave and I saw some of those hidden dogs in the basement of the medical school at George Washington University. We’d heard about a volunteer program inviting outsiders to come in and play with the dogs used for research and had briefly considered applying for positions. The veterinarian who showed us around opened a metal door to a small narrow room with kennels on either side of a walkway, housing maybe a half-dozen large, barking hounds. A cart of dog toys sat idle in the hallway, and a bulletin board with photos of dogs who’d been adopted hung on the wall, reminiscent of collages of recovering kids at a children’s hospital.
What’s stuck with me is that these dogs lived in a building just feet from the Foggy Bottom-GWU Metro station and across a courtyard from the George Washington University Hospital, where I’d been treated several times. Thousands of people passed that building daily. Almost none of them would have known of the dogs.
Animals used in research aren’t just hidden from sight. They’re objectified, or “de-animalized,” Carbone writes in “What Animals Want: Expertise and Advocacy in Laboratory Animal Welfare Policy.” He points out that in grant applications, animals are “supplies,” and in scientific papers, they become “specimens” and “tools.” Euthanasia is a protocol to “sacrifice” an animal, jargon that some lab workers shorten to “sac.” One of the common methods used on mice, which the American Veterinary Medical Foundation says “appears to be humane,” requires separating the mouse’s skull from his or her spine. Lab techs press a pen or pencil behind the mouse’s ears to snap the neck; they refer to the technique by a less unpleasant term, “cervical dislocation.”
Advertisement
Turns out there’s a long history of employing euphemisms around animal research, as we do with the animals we eat: We don’t eat pigs, cows, and sheep; we eat pork, beef, and mutton. A 1927 pamphlet titled “Cruel Experiments on Dogs and Cats Performed in British Laboratories” states, “Vivisectors have a soothing modern expression for the process of starving an animal: they call it ‘prolonged rest of the digestive organs.’”
Around the same time in the United States, the Journal of Experimental Medicine, a respected biomedical publication, adopted an editorial policy that historian Susan Lederer describes as a form of “scientific prior restraint.” For several decades in the middle of the century, editors censored descriptions and illustrations of procedures involving animals, rejected manuscripts that might give antivivisectionists ammunition (or photos they could print in their pamphlets), and devised a system to conceal the number of animals used in studies. Instead of referring to Dog No. 897 in the text — which suggests at least 897 dogs had been used in the author’s experiments — the dog would be referenced as dog A8-97. The editorial staff also avoided including the number of animals killed in the early stages of studies, when a scientist was perfecting a technique or procedure.
The guidelines suggested words to avoid (acute, intense, severe) and words to substitute (hemorrhaging for bleeding, intoxicant for poison, animal for dog, and it for he or she). Also unacceptable: describing an animal as crying out in pain or being restrained. Lederer writes that while defenders of medical research generally accused antivivisectionists of garbling the scientific information they collected from journals, the editing of language and omission of photos “may itself have ‘scrambled’ the communication of laboratory data, skewing expectations, replications, and results.” The objectification and de-individualization of lab animals were undertaken at the journal “not for maximizing scientific objectivity or for minimizing emotional attachment to animals,” she writes, “but for essentially political reasons.”
Advertisement
Carbone and I strolled through the park under a brilliant sun, following Hammy’s nose, and spoke of beagles, writing, his long-ago job feeding snakes at the zoo in Boston, and his varied career as a laboratory animal veterinarian. We stopped a few times to sit, and Carbone gently spread his jacket between Hammy and the cold bench. When the two interacted, Carbone smiled and his eyes twinkled; when Hammy shivered, Carbone pulled him close and kissed the bridge of his nose.
Carbone wishes there weren’t even a role for lab animal veterinarians. He spent his career working to better the lives of animals in labs because, as he writes in his book, the reality is they are there, and he expects they’ll continue to be there for some time. The job isn’t easy: Carbone presided over the deaths of thousands of animals, and almost every day he witnessed what he considers wrongs. The animals’ welfare wasn’t compromised through the “grand torture that the animal rights activists describe,” he writes, but “in a thousand and one smaller ways” — confined, alone, in cages day after day, struggling before a procedure, dying at the hands of a human when they’ve outlived their usefulness. Carbone has adopted a perspective he credits to the late chimpanzee veterinarian James Mahoney: “We may not have a right to experiment on animals, only a very pressing need.”
Excerpted from “Lab Dog” by Melanie D.G. Kaplan, copyright © 2025 by Melanie D.G. Kaplan. Used with permission of Seal Press, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
