Animal experimentation: One Voice obtains new documents on the Mézilles dog farm
This is a new victory in One Voice’s fight for the dogs bred and used at the Breeding Centre for Biological Matter [Centre d’élevage des Souches (CEDS)] in Mézilles, Yonne. On June 5, the Dijon administrative court acceded to our requests, demanding that the CEDS provide us with its correspondence with the prefecture concerning applications for approval and inspections carried out between January 17, 2019 and February 9, 2022. These documents once again reveal the hell that the animals confined at Mézilles have to endure, and the repeated failings of the experimenters.
Among the documents we have received, there are no images, but information that is just as good.
Lives of suffering surrounded by opacity…
Through an individual follow-up sheet misplaced among some fifty other pages, we met a three-year-old Beagle female dog. Without a name, like all her companions in misery, she was exploited as a breeder. On August 14, 2019, she underwent a C-section to give birth to a litter of seven puppies. The same day, barely recovered from this ordeal, she was hysterectomized. What happened to her after she was removed from the list of valuable breeders? Has she been sent to the lab bench to be “recycled” as a punching-ball for drug tests? Or was she killed after her young were snatched from her…?
In this breeding facility, the fate of the pups is just as grim. On December 18, 2019, puppies less than five months old were crammed, two by two, into cramped crates for a long journey lasting several hours. Transported like simple parcels, with no regard for their fragility or well-being, in what condition were they to arrive? We can imagine their suffering, but we’ll never know everything: no details of their transport conditions, no trace of their destination. As if their lives had no value. As if these sentient beings were just products to be sold.
… and numerous shortcomings
In March 2019, the Yonne prefecture sent Marshall BioResources (MBR), the American giant that owns the farm, the inspection report on the control carried out earlier in the year. This is one of the documents to which we have had access… copiously redacted! Nevertheless, we learn that the storage of high-risk drugs was not adequately secured, and that the tutoring for new arrivals was not formalized. What other irregularities did the farm try to hide from us?
A few pages later, it does it again, completely erasing the number of individuals present on its premises and its maximum accommodation capacity. Could it be that it has done something wrong? Once again, the question is relevant.
Making animals profitable at all costs
This report also tells us that, during the Covid-19 epidemic, many orders for animals were cancelled or postponed, resulting in an increase in the number of dogs on site. These individuals that experimenters couldn’t invest in were, for the luckiest ones, offered for adoption. The others were assigned to breeding… before being put to death.
This is where the cynical cruelty of laboratories comes into its own: reducing animals to mere tools, sorting them shamelessly according to the profit to be made from them. Too old, too fat, or with abnormal biochemical results? To avoid them being counted as “surplus” animals, killed without ever having been “used”, they will undergo an experiment or reproduction before being discarded as if they were waste.
Not content with what it already inflicts on the dogs it keeps, MBR has obtained in 2022, for the Mézilles CEDS , an extension of the approval allowing it to carry out projects including surgical interventions. Join us in demanding the closure of this farm!