Along an orchard-lined stretch of Lake Bluff Road outside North Rose, the landscape is awash with green fields, punctuated by splashes of red and orange as the apples begin to ripen in mid-summer.
A few meters from the road, in the middle of a sea of foliage, there is an inconspicuous white and blue sign that reads: “Marshall BioResources.”
Marshall is one of the largest breeding facilities in the country for dogs used in animal testing. More specifically, it breeds thousands of beagles, namely the trademarked Marshall Beagle, a protected breed of beagle bred for drug and pesticide testing.
On a rainy summer day last week, several dozen protesters lined the curb outside Marshall’s, chanting “No excuse for animal cruelty” and “Free the 23,000,” a reference to the number of beagles reportedly housed at the facility.
The protest was part of a tour of labs and breeding facilities by the advocacy group Dog Research Exposed. The aim was to draw attention to Marshall after another breeding facility, Envigo of Cumberland, Virginia, was hit earlier this year with the largest fine ever imposed under the Animal Welfare Act.
That facility closed in 2022 and was fined $35 million last June following an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Among other things, Envigo is said to have failed to document the cause of death of hundreds of puppies, malnourished adult dogs while nursing their puppies, and failed to provide adequate veterinary care.
About 4,000 beagles were removed from the facility, including Cedric, the dog of protest organizer Ellie Hansen.
“We’re very anti-animal cruelty as a society, aren’t we?” Hansen said. “The things they do to the dogs in the lab, they’d arrest you on the front steps of the lab.”
The protest brought together animal rights activists from across the country to force the closure of Marshall. It was the first protest of its kind at the facility. The activists argued that animal testing was cruel, had limited scientific value, and was becoming increasingly obsolete given advances in alternative technologies.
But science argues that such tests are a necessary, if unfortunate, reality.
Animal testing is used for a wide range of scientific purposes, from drug research to toxicology studies on pesticides. Alternative technologies are still in their infancy and it will likely be years, if not decades, before they can replace animal testing on a large scale.
“Considering how long it takes to develop a technology and make sure it works properly, we’re still in the infancy of this technology,” said Jim Newman, director of strategic communications at Americans for Medical Progress. “But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have tremendous promise.”
Americans for Medical Progress is a nonprofit organization that educates the public about animal testing. Marshall referred questions to the group.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture regularly conducts inspections at the Wayne County facility. While those inspections have found some cases of abuse, such as a kitten found with a broken tail without adequate explanation, no serious systemic problems have been reported at Marshall, records show.
Beagles and medical research
Although Marshall Bioresources is located just a half-hour from the city, it is likely unknown to most Rochester residents, even though the facility has long been the target of animal rights activists such as the Animal Liberation Front and Showing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK).
Founded in 1939 by Marshall Gilman, the company was formerly known as Marshall Farms. At the time, the company’s focus was on breeding ferrets and developing its own breed called the Marshall Ferret.
These ferrets are still bred by Marshall, the largest ferret breeder in the country. These ferrets are used in biomedical research, but are also sold in pet stores worldwide. The company also makes ferret food, toys and costumes.
As Marshall expanded its offering to include scientific products, the number of animals also grew. The company also breeds Marshall cats and Göttingen mini pigs.
Animal rights activists argue that the gentle nature of beagles is attractive to researchers.
“A terrier would bite your face off, but not a beagle,” Hansen said. “That’s what they’re used for.”
Although Beagles are small, generally friendly and easy to handle, their specific use is a bit more complex.
Decades of scientific research have led to a good understanding of the genetics of the Beagle. A specific, consistent lineage serves as the basis for experiments.
“Whether it’s a rat, a cat or a dog, these animals are not just any animals, they are bred specifically for research purposes,” said Newman. “We can actually breed animals with the purest genetics, so we can essentially eliminate the factors that influence the study results.”
According to the Humane Society of America, an average of about 44,000 dogs are used in animal testing in the United States each year. Dogs are primarily used for toxicology or safety testing, including for novel drugs monitored by the Food and Drug Administration and pesticides monitored by the Environmental Protection Agency. Beagles were also used by South Korean researchers in 2022 to learn how COVID-19 affects organs.
The vast majority of animals used for experimental purposes are rodents.
The alternative
In 2022, President Joe Biden signed the FDA Modernization Act 2.0. This bill was one of the first major updates to the FDA in decades and was seen as a major victory for animal rights activists.
The law repealed a provision that required animal testing in drug development and opened the door to computer-based models as an alternative. The requirement to conduct animal testing for all new drugs had been in place since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act in 1938.
The FDA Modernization Act 3.0, a bipartisan bill, was introduced earlier this year with the goal of further reducing animal testing and increasing the efficiency of drug trials.
“They have computer models, they have 50 years of data to work with,” said Andy Dutton, a local animal activist who attended the protest in Marshall. “They have the tissues on a chip, they can give them a drug and then see how it responds.”
This technology, known as tissue-on-a-chip or organ-on-a-chip, is one of the most promising alternatives to animal testing currently being investigated. Put simply, this technology takes a small sample of human organ cells and places them on a transparent computer chip. The chip is designed to serve as a replica of the organ system and provide an accurate representation of how a particular drug or toxin interacts with that organ.
James McGrath, a professor of biomedical research at the University of Rochester and one of the leading scientists developing tissue-on-chip technology, said the science was promising but still limited.
“The downside is that it models a small part of an organism that is very complicated and very large and has many interacting systems,” McGrath said. “So that’s what animals provide that I don’t think these chips will be able to provide for a long, long time – how do these different tissues interact, how does that work at a systems level?”
McGrath said a key aspect of animal testing that cannot currently be reproduced with tissue-on-chip is biodistribution, or where a drug ends up in the body.
Even though the scientific background for this is still limited, it already serves practical purposes.
According to McGrath, the greatest potential of tissue-on-chip technology is in toxicological studies, i.e. research for which beagles are often used.
Tissue-on-chip technology aims to achieve two goals: to reduce the number of animal tests and to increase the efficiency and accuracy of preclinical studies. The National Institutes of Health estimate that about 30% of new drugs fail in human clinical trials after being shown to be safe in animal studies.
Although research is currently being carried out into building complete, networked models of the human body on chips, we are still a long way from implementation.
“I’m not going to say it will never be true that we can’t achieve such predictions on a chip, but it will certainly be a lot longer into the future before we stop using animals,” McGrath said.
Animal testing is regulated by the Animal Welfare Act. This requires research institutes that conduct animal testing to set up committees to confirm that the laboratories comply with the legal provisions.
The goal of the protesters is to shut down Marshall completely. Scarlet Strakova came to the protest with her beagle Gabby from Connecticut. Gabby, another rescue dog from Envigo, has been missing an eye since her time at the facility.
“I think this is no longer necessary, we know that,” said Strakova. “We don’t have to torture animals anymore.”
For Newman of the organization Americans for Medical Progress, the use of dogs and other animals in animal testing is an unfortunate reality that is closely linked to the development of new drugs and a better understanding of human physiology.
“This is a grey area. We have to be clear that no one involved in animal testing wants to do research on animals,” Newman said. “But what is the other alternative, stopping the research altogether?”
