Perspective: The long history of beagles helping to produce scientific breakthroughs — for dogs and humans
Humans and dogs, as any pet owner will tell you, are extremely alike. Many of our basic biological systems are similar: Dogs get cancers like ours and respond to some pharmaceuticals like we do. Beagles, a medium-sized and friendly breed, are easy to work with and cheap to feed, making them useful laboratory animals. But the full answer requires a longer historical view.In the first decades of the 20th century, scientists began to worry about the reliability of their laboratory animals.
Outside of the walls of the laboratory, however, American dog culture was changing and altering the fates of many breeds. Beagles were always common dogs, ever since their importation from England in the late 19th century, but they experienced a steady climb in popularity as dog ownership exploded in the 1930s and ’40s.
America’s nuclear scientists settled on the dog and chose beagles, which were bred in most states and thus easy to purchase. From 1950 until the early 1980s, large-scale beagle radiobiology studies were conducted across the country: at the University of California at Davis, the University of Utah, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Rochester and more.
But radiobiologists weren’t alone. Pharmaceutical researchers and the FDA also began prominently favoring beagles. The FDA’s toxicity testing guidelines from 1955 noted that the agency used beagles for internal appraisals — but stopped short of formally endorsing the breed. That changed in the early 1960s after researchers realized that thalidomide, a popular morning sickness medication used by pregnant women, could cause serious birth defects in their children.
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