AMY GOODMAN: If you can talk, Glenn Greenwald, about the investigation you did, Bred to Suffer:
Inside the Barbaric U.S. Industry of Dog Experimentation.
GLENN GREENWALD: A lot of people, Amy, including people who follow animal rights issues somewhat
closely, don’t even realize that it is legal in the United States to conduct scientific
experimentation on dogs.
But not only is it legal; it is pervasive.
In 2016, just in terms of what was reported—and the numbers are definitely far greater—60,000
dogs were subjected to all kinds of experimentations.
Not just medical experimentations where pathogens are injected into their brains by drilling
holes in their head, but where they are force-fed commercial products like laundry detergent
right into the stomach using oral garage, the same same technique used to make fois
gras, in which just placed into their stomach are commercial products that cause them to
vomit and go into seizures and comas, just for pure commercial testing.
And even researchers say that most of the time, these experiments produce little to
no value because the physiology of dogs is so much different than that of humans and
there are far better methods, such as stem cell research, that provide much greater information.
But there is an entire industry in the United States that has no purpose but to breed dogs
into life.
They create life.
Those dogs have no purpose but to serve as objects of experimentation.
They are kept in small cages, often never being removed from their cages, experimented
on in the most horrific ways, and then when their usage is done as experimental objects,
they are simply killed.
It is incredibly immoral to create life for no reason other than to experiment on a living
being that as anyone who has dogs knows, is capable of all kinds of emotional complexity
and suffering.
We were able to report on these activists who entered Ridglan Farms, which is a large
farm just west of Madison, Wisconsin, where beagles, which are the preferred breed because
they’ve been bred to be docile and sweet and trusting of humans, are kept by the thousands
and sold to research facilities at the University of California, to corporations around the
world, with very few standards about what is done to them and to their suffering that
they endure.
And it’s amazing because there’s lots of controversy in the U.S.—we love to protest
dog meat festivals in China and South Korea and act very morally outraged over the news
reports that we read about that.
As we should—it is horrible.
But here in the United States, there is an entire industry that subjects those dogs to
methods that are just as horrible in terms of the pain and suffering they endure, purely
for commercial profit.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Glenn, could you talk about Sonny Perdue, President Trump’s appointee
to head the U.S. Department of Agriculture?
His oversight role and his own record?
GLENN GREENWALD: Sure.
So Sonny Perdue, who is now the secretary of agriculture under Donald Trump, is a very
typical appointee, not just for the Trump administration, but for administrations for
several decades, in which he comes from the very industry that he is now charged with
regulating and overseeing.
When he was governor of Georgia, he was a huge recipient of agribusiness donations in
the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
He himself comes from that industry.
He owned farms.
He was I believe a veterinarian or a scientist who cared for animals, but then in his adult
life, started profiteering off of agribusiness and then became a favored candidate of that
industry and that is the reason he was chosen.
And it is amazing, Juan—the secretary of the Department of Agriculture, like all cabinet
agencies, has an inspector general whose job is to investigate its own agency and determine
their own complaints with the law.
And every five years starting in 1995, then 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, the inspector general
has said the same thing, which is that the Department of Agriculture’s enforcement
of even the minimum treatment requirements for animals who are subject to experimentation,
including dogs, has been so lax and so permissive that there is no incentive for corporations
even to abide by the law because even when they purposefully and systematically violate
it, they barely get fined at all.
And like so many things, it has gotten somewhat worse under the Trump Administration.
But it is a continuation of what has been going on for decades in this country when
it comes to the treatment of animals for corporate profit.
Sonny Perdue is just a really vivid example of the revolving door sleaze that is corrupting
our democracy and corrupting Washington, because it’s sort of exactly like putting the people
who are most vested in allowing these industries to get away with things in charge of enforcing
the laws that apply to them
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, I wanted to turn to a video produced by PETA, People for
the Ethical Treatment of Animals, about their investigation into dog experimentation by
Liberty Research Incorporated.
UNIDENTIFIED: If you were to drive by this cluster of buildings, you might never imagine
the pain and misery behind their walls.
Dogs with holes drilled into their heads, cats suffocated under flipped-over litter
boxes, dogs injected with insecticides.
This is what was documented by a PETA eyewitness at Liberty Research, a laboratory hired by
companies to conduct experiments on hundreds of dogs and cats each year.
Liberty also breeds thousands of animals to sell for experimentation to veterinary pharmaceutical
giants, government agencies and universities.
Hundreds of animals at Liberty are treated like inanimate laboratory tools and forced
to suffer in experiments each year, even when well-established non-animal methods are available.
In one experiment, young dogs were injected with megadoses of an opioid.
They became lethargic and refused to eat.
In another experiment, a drill was used to bore holes into the skulls of 30 docs so that
distemper virus could be injected into their brains.
Some dogs whimpered during the painful procedure, indicating that they were not properly anesthetized.
A senior worker said that one of the dogs repeatedly banged her head on the cage floor,
and others foamed at the mouth or had seizures.
In an experiment sponsored by Intervet, a subsidiary of Merck, workers injected an insecticide
into dogs.
Liberty’s clients include Merial, Bayer, Merck, the USDA, Michigan State University
and the universities of Pittsburgh, Florida and Louisville, among others.
AMY GOODMAN: That video produced by PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Before we move on to break, your final comment on this, Glenn?
*GLENN GREENWALD: I think that we need to have a reckoning with ourselves about what
it is that we believe we are willing to permit when it comes to the treatment of living beings
with the capacity to feel pain and suffering.
There’s a wide range of debate about whether you should be a vegan or a vegetarian or whether
it is morally permissible to eat meat.
But you can set that debate aside for these purposes, and I think we should all agree
that the kind of gratuitous torture that is being imposed on a corporate and systemic-wide
basis in the United States on all kinds of animals is just morally unconscionable and
shameful and we all have the responsibility to put a stop to it.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, we’re going to break and then come back to talk to you
about other issues, from the Mueller investigation to what’s happening with Julian Assange.
Is Ecuador trying to force him out of the embassy in London?
Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.
Back with him in 30 seconds.