unlike Lucky—were too weak to stand or even crawl; still others had already died from starvation or exposure while confined in filthy, overcrowded, and unsheltered conditions. Especially prominent within Brown’s compound were beagles and other hunting hounds, the former regarded as a “hot item” (Silva 1966, 25) because of the high demand for them in research labs. Many of Brown’s animals were presumed to be stolen from neighborhood streets and backyards, a story line underscored by a segment of the article that focused on a photo of a little girl hugging Reds, an Irish setter who disappeared one night from her Philadelphia home and was later spotted—and returned to her family—by a doctor in a New York hospital who was alert to the stolen pet trade. The article told of other people similarly reunited with their stolen dogs, the most poignant tale perhaps being that of a mongrel named Lancer, who escaped from a Harvard Medical School (HMS) lab by chewing through his leash and who managed to make his way back home over twenty miles away to Newton, Massachusetts. Photographed with a boy named Thomas Connollys, Lancer sported a metal tag that read “H.M.S. M-680,” a haunting memento of Lancer’s harrowing journey. Unlike other sickly dogs who had to be euthanized, Lucky the pointer was successfully nursed back to health and, as a moving photo attested, adopted by a family that happily whisked him away in their spacious sedan. (See figures 3 and 4.)10
FIGURES 3 AND 4. Images from “Concentration Camp for Dogs,” Life magazine, February 4, 1966. Stan Wayman, photographer. The captions read as follows: (top) “Scene at a dog dealer’s compound, 1966” and (bottom) “Angered by the disappearance of their family pets in Clarke County, Va., Mrs. William Mitchell and her neighbors put up signs to discourage thieves.” Courtesy of Getty Images.
“Concentration Camp for Dogs” followed on the heels of an earlier essay by Coles Phinizy that appeared in the November 29, 1965, issue of Sports Illustrated (Phinizy 1965).11 As with the Life article, Phinizy’s essay provided details of several households whose members had searched for stolen pets in a wide range of states, often encountering obstacles from the law and pound employees who appeared to be in cahoots with dog dealers and, in turn, medical school labs. Phinizy’s story opened with the tale of “the martyred Pepper,” described as “a five-year-old Dalmatian bitch of affectionate disposition” (36) who had disappeared from her home on a farm in Slatington, Pennsylvania, and whose owner, while hospitalized, recognized his dog in a news photo of a random source dealer’s truck. When the dealer was arrested for “improperly loading a shipment of dogs and goats,” the animals were seized and held overnight in a shelter, where they were photographed by members of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), who then passed the images on to a local newspaper. Pepper’s owner’s wife—aided by U.S. Representative Joseph Resnick of New York—attempted in vain to rescue Pepper. Records indicated that Pepper had exchanged hands four times before arriving at Montefiore Hospital in New York, where she was euthanized and cremated following a research procedure. As Phinizy underscored, “her death and disappearance have made [two things] quite clear: 1) many pet dogs are being stolen from the front lawns and sidewalks of this country, and 2) the thefts in large part are motivated by science’s constant and growing need for laboratory animals” (36). Phinizy was more willing to condemn the dealer than the researcher, yet the culpability of the latter was palpable. He concluded his article by describing the fate of a policeman’s German shepherd named Peanuts, who was stolen from her front yard in full view of local residents. In Phinizy’s words, the “pet passed—for a price—through progressively cleaner hands until, in what may well have seemed a perfectly legitimate deal to the man in charge, he ended up in a laboratory and there was used to fill some scientists’ very real need for experimental animals” (44–45).
As noted by USDA welfare staff writers today, Life and Sports Illustrated successfully alerted the public to a predatory trade in snatched pets that fed the needs of laboratory research (Adams and Larson 2016). Indeed, as several members of Congress reported, letters from constituents expressing outrage after reading these articles outnumbered those protesting U.S. involvement in Vietnam (Stevens 1990). Together, they generated a groundswell of support behind a campaign for lab animal welfare reform. Representative Resnick, alongside Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania, sponsored bills in each house of Congress that required the licensing of animal dealers and the labs with which they worked by the USDA, which was also empowered to conduct on-site inspections of both (Adams and Larson 2016).
Needless to say, opposition to the proposed legislation arose in some quarters of laboratory science. Phinizy summarized the arguments as follows: “1) it would hamper research, 2) it was playing into the hands of antivivisectionists [the contemporary term for animal rights activists] and 3) it was unworkable, unconstitutional and discriminatory, since in its original form it legislated only against dealers who sold to laboratories” (1965, 41). One pro-science lobbyist, Dr. Robert Estep, asserted that reports of dog-napping were far exaggerated from the actual numbers and, thus, did not warrant reform, to which Phinizy shot back that if such logic were applied to the Lindbergh kidnapping—that “there are really very few children stolen annually”—there would be no need to seek stricter punishments for those who abduct children. Phinizy defended the legislation by underscoring the affective power and social worth assigned to dogs in American society, arguing that “what Dr. Estep seems to overlook is the further fact that, almost as much as a child, the domestic dog is part of the human heart and the human home and has been since lost time, for reasons no one can or need explain” (1965, 41–42). The affective dimensions of Phinizy’s essay are evident, too, in a sheriff’s account of a horse trailer found crammed with dogs piled on top of each other, some of whom were dead—an account eerily reminiscent of a slave ship (1965). PL 89-544, known today as the U.S. Animal Welfare Act (AWA) of 1966, was signed into law by President Johnson on August 24 of that year (Adams and Larson 2016).
These were hardly the first such stories to appear in the mainstream press regarding the role of pet-snatching as a means to supply animals to science. As historian Susan Lederer chronicles, the media mogul William Randolph Hearst was an avid supporter of anti-vivisectionism, and throughout the first half of the twentieth century, his newspapers chronicled many stories of pets stolen for research purposes in an effort to bring about legislative reforms (Lederer 1992, 63–64).12 Nevertheless, Life, well known for its persuasive photojournalism, proved especially effective in rallying public sentiment behind welfare reforms to protect animals used in research. Indeed, fifty years later, “Concentration Camps for Dogs” was credited during my interviews with activists, lab veterinarians, and animal law experts as facilitating the passing of the AWA.
In addition to gut-wrenching images of suffering animals, the photos in the Life essay especially relied heavily on powerful tropes of race, age, class, and regional difference, playing up conflicts in moral sensibility between an innocent public and elite research establishments, where the Humane Society and other animal welfare agencies served as powerful intermediaries in a clash between American families and experimental science. Indeed, the full array of Life photos taken by Stan Wayman (some of which did not appear in the original article) featured white families and, not unlike Phinizy, placed a special emphasis on traumatized children and home lives torn asunder.13 The icon of these injustices was the dog as family pet, as opposed to, say, a cat (a species widely used in laboratories at the time) or various types of working animals. The loving environment of family life stood in stark contrast to the research goals of large, private universities and medical schools, alongside pernicious middlemen who capitalized on the vulnerabilities of the former and the professional needs of the latter. As a result, Lucky, Lance, Red, and Pepper played pivotal roles in alerting the American public to a darker side of medical research. And whereas Phinizy’s essay reported examples from diverse locations around the country (illustrated by way of an artist’s drawings, not photographs), Life
