If a book’s topic were “farms for the production of beagles for some appallingly inhumane biomedical and consumer product research,” you’d shy away from it, right? And you’d do that no matter how important you might think it is for people in general to understand the cost of animal research to the animals and to society. Right again? For one thing, books about animal testing can be difficult to emotionally abide. You might assume that yet another book would put readers like you in the impossible position of knowing that you are a powerless participant in a colossal system that grinds steadily along, doing enormousharm and maybe only minimally providing for the greater good.
Would you be more inclined to read a book that seemed especially well-reasoned and non-hysterical? For example, what if it suggested specific ways in which the greater good is not always the direct result of animal testing — but also showed that animal testing can save human lives aplenty? What if the book suggested that guidelines and better practices might help? What if its sometimes disturbing information were enveloped in a narrative that provides you, the reader, with enough islands of safety that you might tolerate reading it?
Any writer who can balance bits of relief like that with the horror of tens of thousands of tortured animals a year and keep readers on-task would probably deserve high praise. Melanie D. G. Kaplan deserves real acclaim for her new book, LAB DOG: A Beagle and His Human Investigate the Surprising World of Animal Research.
Kaplan was a “mere” travel writer when she first undertook her investigation into the practice of beagle farming. She became irretrievably interested in the topic as a result of falling in love with one particular rescue beagle. The day she met Hammy (short for “Alexander Hamilton”), he was almost four years old. He had spent his entire life in a small cage. She watched as he and a few of his fellow rescues touched their feet to grass for the first time. Hammy didn’t quite know how to walk outside of a cage. His steps were ridiculously high, like those of a Clydesdale. Kaplan thought he looked as though he were walking on tippy toes.
No pushover, Kaplan fell in love with Hammy only slowly. She intended to foster him and to give him up one day to a permanent home. (She’d done that with a beagle not too long before.) Once she decided that she couldn’t part with odd little Hammy, she began investigating his probable roots. What kind of circumstances had he been born into? Why must tens of thousands of beagles like him give their youths or entire lives every year to researchers who underestimate the pain they are causing? Where did the idea originate that beagles, rodents, primates, and other common lab animals can’t feel pain? Is there ever a good reason for live animal testing? What are some bad ones? What are some bad lab practices? What are some ways to breed and test that don’t require animals to suffer?
These are fraught questions that a large handful of nonfiction books have already explored, some well, some a little too dryly, some a little too dramatically. Kaplan explores the questions in depth and does a truly masterful job of bringing her readers along with her as she (and Hammy) figure it all out. They take road trips to interview major players in the animal testing debates. The road trips themselves are surprisingly engaging with atmospheric touches and personality descriptions. (Remember, Kaplan started as a travel writer.)
Hammy is the book’s lodestone. He was hurt. He remains an odd duck. (Wrong metaphor, I know, for a beagle.) She describes him so compellingly that he magnetically draws readers in. (That’s what lodestones are all about.) We care right away about his limitations, his roots and the fates of animals like him. Thankfully, though, every time a bit of information about the gargantuan harm inflicted on animals like Hammy infuriates us, the narrative dips back into his now quotidian story. Enjoying the details of his comfortable life, we readers feel as safe for a while as he probably does. The air cleared of traumatic overtones, we catch our breaths. Eventually, we can press on with the book because we’ve learned to trust Kaplan. She doesn’t dismiss all animal testing as unnecessary. She questions it and argues that better controls, better methods and better guidelines are needed.
Kaplan may have originated as a travel writer, but now she’s a damn good science journalist, as well.
Hammy was born on a 3,220-acre property with 52,700 square feet of kennel space for 5,000 beagles. Five hundred puppies are born every month on that one breeding farm. Live testing on beagles is a gargantuan business. The trade in rats, mice, and rabbits is even bigger. Count in primates while you’re at it. Cat fans, count the cats. Kaplan clear-headedly examines the moral question of whether and in what cases the benefit to humans of live animal testing outweighs the cost to animals, and she doesn’t settle for easy answers.
Highly readable. Highly recommended.
LAB DOG: A Beagle and his Human Investigate the Surprising World of Animal Research
By Melanie D.G. Kaplan
On sale Oct 14, 2025
352 pages
Seal Press
ISBN-13 9781541604988
Hardcover $32.00
