State SPCA Supports Proposal To Keep Animals From Labs

The Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA), charging that research institutes including Harvard are inhumane to cats and dogs in their scientific experiments, is attempting to repeal a state law that enables the institutes to buy unclaimed animals from city pounds at low prices.

Marianna R. Burt, director of ethical studies for the MSPCA, said yesterday that the group has introduced a bill in the State legislature to strike down a 25-year-old law that allows the pound seizures, adding that the bill would guarantee that pound animals are not used in lab work.

The MSPCA claims that pets are less suited for experiments than specially bred lab animals because they have a lower survival rate. But said, adding that the unknown condition of pound animals before they are caught adversely affect statistical results.

De. Stephen F. Vatner, associate professor of medicine and a researcher at the New England Primate Center, said yesterday that stray dogs ands cats are better for scientific work because they give a wider range of results.

Experiments with pound animals are "clearly ethical" because they are painless and will ultimately benefit humans. Vatner said, adding that any animal killed in a laboratory would eventually be put to death by the MSPCA.

"Our experiments are entirely painless," Dr. Clifford A. Barger, Pfeiffer Professor of Physiology, said yesterday. In response to the MSPCA's charge of cruelty, Barger said that "as usual, their propaganda is wrong," adding that "they stretch the exaggerations, so put it mildly."

Both researchers agreed that repeal of the current law would severely limit research at Harvard and in the rest of the state. Barger said it would take laboratories three to five years to raise their own dogs.