GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — “Every single dog deserves to have a name. They deserve to not be a number. They deserve to have a couch to sit on and people to love them and grass to walk on,” Brianna Shahly, marketing and communications coordinator for Humane Society of West Michigan told FOX 17.
4,000 beagles were rescued from a testing facility in Virginia, and now, more than two dozen of them are heading to west Michigan.
READ MORE: Beagles rescued from 'prison-like conditions' coming to west Michigan
“Seeing the articles was really hard. Seeing the pictures was even harder, but knowing that we could do something to help, that’s obviously our goal. We always want to help these animals as much as we can,” Shahly said.
Humane Society of the United States partnered with Humane Society of West Michigan to help find permanent homes for the beagles.
“They were being kept in really horrible conditions, prison-like cells, very unclean, filthy. A lot of these animals were sick. They were all under-socialized and some, when they were actually able to get law enforcement into the facility to get the animals out of the situation they were in, some of them were even deceased,” Shahly added.
“We’ve been familiar with this facility in Virginia for a long time and, there’s no other way to put it other than it’s essentially a dog factory farm. I mean, at any given point, this facility houses thousands of dogs, all of whom are destined to use in often painful and often deadly experiments,” added Ryan Merkley, director of research advocacy at Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.
“Just to put a fine point on some of the things that they found in this facility, you know, over the course of months, they found more than 300 puppies who had died for unknown reasons, quote on quote, unknown reasons. There were staff who weren’t veterinarians or veterinary technicians injecting euthanasia solution, with a needle, directly into the heart of young puppies, and these animals were fully conscious, able to feel that needle penetrate their chest cavity. They found maggots and rotten food in their food. They found other insects in their food. The dogs were so cramped in these cages that there were instances of mothers actually rolling over and suffocating their puppies inadvertently because their cages were so cramped,” Merkley explained to FOX 17.
Merkley added that the facility has since been shut down, but he says this shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
“What we’d love to see is for these facilities to never even get to that point. Meaning, we need stronger laws that prohibit the kinds of experiments these dogs are bred for and that’s one thing we’re working on in Michigan. We need better enforcement by the US Department of Agriculture, and we need a stronger federal Animal Welfare Act so that these kinds of things don’t happen in the first place,” he said.
The Humane Society of West Michigan told FOX 17 that the beagles will arrive within the next few weeks.
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