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At Texas A&M University, experimenters led by Peter Nghiem have bred golden retrievers and other dogs to develop Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a particularly severe form of muscular dystrophy (MD). The disease ravages their bodies, causing progressive muscle wasting and weakness.
Video footage from this laboratory shows that appallingly thin dogs were caged, sometimes alone, in barren metal cells and struggled to swallow thin gruel—the only food that they could eat, given how easily they could choke. Long ropes of saliva hung from the mouths of dogs whose jaw muscles had weakened. Even balancing was difficult. Dogs with this condition are also at great risk for pneumonia because they can easily inhale liquid into their lungs.
Dogs who didn't have the disease but carried the DMD gene had been used for breeding. Deprived of loving homes, they frantically paced the slatted floors and bit the bars of small cages in frustration. They didn't even have the comfort of a blanket.
To gauge just how much a dog's muscles have deteriorated, the former head of this laboratory invented a crude technique that could pass for medieval torture: Experimenters repeatedly stretched them with a motorized lever in order to cause muscle tears.
Under pressure from 500 physicians, humans with MD, and PETA supporters, Texas A&M stopped breeding the dogs, but many are still held in this laboratory—even though nearly 40 years of MD experiments on dogs have failed to produce a cure in humans.
You Can Help Stop This!
Please ask the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to stop funding these cruel experiments on dogs.