13 Dogs Used in Research Are ‘Liberated’

Thirteen beagles used for medical research at University of California, Irvine, have been stolen by an animal rights group that said it broke into the campus kennel and freed the dogs to spare them the “pain and misery” of more research.

The dogs, housed in an outdoor kennel at the university’s North Campus, were apparently stolen Friday night but were not discovered missing until Saturday afternoon when a group calling itself the Animal Liberation Front delivered a typewritten note and photograph to The Times’ Orange County offices.

“This liberation was to protest UCI’s growing use of animals in fraudulent medical research, research nothing will come of except pain and misery to humans and nonhumans alike,” the note said.

The color photograph showed a beagle being held by a person wearing a blue ski mask. Protruding from the dog’s forehead was a diode, a plastic tube commonly used to attach electrodes in brain research.

Although the note said 10 dogs had been taken, campus police said 13 beagles were missing.

“Apparently someone cut through two locks, drove a van or something around the back of the kennel, loaded them up and took them away,” said Michael Michell, chief of UCI’s campus police.

Unlike similar cases at other universities where animal rights activists have stolen animals and vandalized the adjoining research centers, there appeared to be no damage to research offices, Michell said.

Kathy Jones, a UCI spokeswoman, said it was the first time that the university had experienced such a break-in. In April, 1986, she recalled, 10 animal rights activists were arrested at the North Campus during a protest against the use of animals in medical research.

“But besides that, this is the first time we have had this kind of quasi-terrorist type of incident,” she said.

Robert Phalen, who heads the UCI research team that has been using the dogs, said 12 of the beagles had been utilized to study the effects of air pollution on the lungs and on exercise. The 13th dog, the one shown in the photograph, had been used in research studying complications in tracheotomies, he said.

Phalen said the dogs ranged in ages from 2 to almost 13 years, and some had been in the program for as long as 12 years.

“These are happy animals,” Phalen said. “I saw that animal with the diode just the other day, and it was up and happy and wagging its tail.