On this day in vegan history · August 24, 1966
The Law That Saved Lab Dogs, Not Farm Animals
A stolen Dalmatian and a magazine photo essay shamed Congress into policing research kennels, then lawmakers drew the line exactly at the farm gate.
The facts
- Signed
- August 24, 1966, Cabinet Room, White House, by President Lyndon B. Johnson
- Origin bill
- H.R. 9743, introduced by Rep. Joseph Y. Resnick, July 9, 1965
- Animals covered
- Dogs, cats, hamsters, rabbits, nonhuman primates, guinea pigs, and other warm-blooded research animals
- Animals excluded
- Farm animals, birds, and laboratory rats and mice
On August 24, 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Laboratory Animal Welfare Act in the White House Cabinet Room, the country's first federal law setting minimum standards for how animals used in research are housed, sold, and handled. Congress moved after Sports Illustrated traced a stolen Dalmatian named Pepper from a Pennsylvania backyard to a Bronx hospital, where she died in an experimental surgery, and Life magazine photographed skeletal dogs at a Maryland dealer's farm under the headline "Concentration Camp for Dogs." The law required licensing and inspection of dealers and set care standards for dogs, cats, and other warm-blooded research animals. It said nothing about the animals raised and killed for food, a carve-out federal law still holds to.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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But science and research do not compel us to tolerate the kind of inhumanity which has been involved in the business of supplying stolen animals to laboratories or which is sometimes involved in the careless and callous handling of animals in some of our laboratories.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, remarks upon signing the Animal Welfare Bill, August 24, 1966
Source: LBJ Presidential Library -
The quality of a culture is measured by its reverence for all life.
Albert Schweitzer, quoted by President Johnson at the signing ceremony, August 24, 1966
Source: LBJ Presidential Library
Why it still matters
It was the first crack in the idea that animals used by humans were nobody's legal business, but the line it drew, covering a fraction of research animals while exempting farm animals outright, is close to the same line federal law still draws six decades later.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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