Petition: The Last Major Dog Supplier for US Labs Is in His District. He Just Filed a Bill to Defund Its Customers.

In North Rose, New York, there is a facility called Marshall BioResources. It breeds beagles, and it is the last major supplier of dogs to American laboratories. North Rose sits in New York’s 23rd congressional district, which is represented by Nick Langworthy.

On 23 September, Langworthy introduced a bill to cut off the federal money that keeps that industry running. The Companion Animal Protection Against Cruel Testing Act, filed as H.R. 10522 with Wisconsin Democrat Mark Pocan as co-lead, would bar the Department of Health and Human Services and every agency under it, including the National Institutes of Health, the FDA and the CDC, from funding research on live dogs and cats.

A congressman introducing legislation aimed squarely at an industry operating in his own district is not a common thing, and it is the detail that tells you how far public opinion on this has moved. The bill is bipartisan, endorsed by Humane World for Animals, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, PETA, Animal Wellness Action and the White Coat Waste Project, which is not a coalition that agrees on much else.

Sign the Petition

The bill does four things beyond the funding ban. It establishes a process to retire and rehome the dogs and cats currently living in federally funded laboratories, rather than leaving their fate to the institutions holding them. It creates compliance and oversight mechanisms with enforcement attached. It requires HHS to report annually on what it is funding. And it extends whistleblower protections to laboratory staff, which matters because almost everything the public knows about conditions inside these facilities has come from people who risked their jobs to say so.

There is a carve-out worth being clear about: according to a fact sheet from the supporting organisations, the restriction would not apply to research intended to improve the health of dogs and cats themselves. This is a bill about ending experiments on companion animals for human medicine, not about veterinary science.

The argument the sponsors are making is partly about method rather than sentiment. Non-animal research tools have moved considerably in the last decade, and organoids, laboratory cell systems and computational modelling now do work that previously required a live animal. The White Coat Waste Project puts NIH spending on new dog and cat laboratory work at more than $225 million during the current administration, a figure attributed to its own records analysis. The case being made is that this is money buying worse science than the alternatives.

Add Your Name

Now the part that matters most and gets left out of almost every piece written about a bill like this. H.R. 10522 has been introduced. It has not passed, it has not had a committee vote, and the overwhelming majority of bills introduced in Congress die quietly without one. Bipartisan sponsorship and a broad endorsement list improve the odds and guarantee nothing. We have covered a case where a campaign kept pushing a bill that had already failed, and the lesson from that is to watch what the legislation actually does rather than what the press release says it will do. Signing is worth two minutes. Asking your own representative to co-sponsor is worth considerably more, because co-sponsor counts are what move a bill out of committee.

More Petitions to Sign

• The Video Went Viral. The Bill It Was Meant to Pass Died in Committee.
• The Neighbours Heard the Air Gun. Then They Heard Tubby Screaming.
• She Threw Three Kittens Onto a Georgia Road. A Driver Behind Her Wrote Down the Plate.