Shelter Animals in Laboratory Experimentation 367 Shelter Pet Experimentation (Aka Pound Seizure) History and Past Practice in the USA In the 1940s, pound seizure became a common practice in taxpayer-funded animal shelters across the country and resulted in numerous state laws requiring the practice Pound seizure, or pound release, involves a shelter selling or giving away cats and dogs to Class B Dealers, random source animal brokers licensed by the U.S Department of Agriculture, who then resell the animals for research and experimentation It also involves shelters providing animals directly to research laboratories or university training programs (Phillips 2010, p 14) The theft of a Dalmatian dog named Pepper from her front yard in Pennsylvania created the US Laboratory Animal Welfare Act of 1966 (7 U.S.C 2131, et seq.), now called the Animal Welfare Act, a law that provides some protection to cats and dogs in research laboratories After Pepper’s theft, she was transferred several times until she died during a pacemaker research study at a New York hospital Her family searched for her, but found her too late Pepper’s heartbreaking story and the Life Magazine exposé Concentration Camp for Dogs (4 February 1966) quickly led to a grassroots uprising in which voters bombarded Congress with outrage The volume and intensity of this letter-writing campaign briefly surpassed even those surrounding the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War Decades later, the controversy of using former family pets in experimentation resulted in The Atlantic magazine, in July 2000, publishing an exposé called From the Leash to the Laboratory on the animal experimentation industry using family pets that had been stolen and brokered on the black market (Reitman 2000) The Animal Welfare Act was created to stop the theft of pets being brokered into research, but there are still enough anecdotal stories that cause concern in knowledgeable pet owners in the USA Yet, the practice continues to this day with one primary argument from advocates for the practice: the shelter cats and dogs sold into research would have otherwise been euthanized The justification from proponents is to allow the cat and dog to be useful and contribute in the efforts to solve human and animal diseases through research experimentation Opponents to the practice argue that using animal shelters in this manner is a betrayal of trust to communities, to the animals involved, that animals are not an effective model when it comes to human health research, and the practice involves the unconsented use of American taxpayer dollars to fund the research projects