P.O. Box 424, Yardley, PA 19067-8424 brl@beaglerescueleague.org

Lab to Leash

“You can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals”  – Immanuel Kant 

The Lab To Leash program is designed to help beagles retiring from research facilities.

Many dogs spend their lives as service dogs and receive the highest accolades.  Beagles are used as Search and Sniff dogs for U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, as members of the Beagle Brigade to sniff out illegal produce for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and even as Bed Bug Sniffing dogs! Everyone we know thinks that it’s amazing.  But did you know that just as many dogs are service dogs that don’t get the recognition they deserve?  Those dogs are life savers, too…but their jobs are not in the forefront of the public eye.  Why?  Because they are dogs that provide their service behind closed doors – to the biomedical research community.

Lab To Leash benefits the dogs who have spent their lives helping us to make medical progress through their “work”.  When it’s time for them to retire, we get a request to help these very special retirees find their new and forever homes. After beginning this work in 2005, and establishing a respectable program as the Laboratory Beagle Adoption Division of Cascade Beagle Rescue-East, we continued our relationships with nearly 20 (and counting) research facilities as the Lab to Leash Division! We have maintained a history of positive, collaborative relationships with EVERY research facility since we started in 2005, and have repeated releases from the same facilities.

We have never sought out publicity for our work, and have sadly seen the unfortunate, unintended repercussions of releasing to other groups that do, as they care more about an agenda than truly helping dogs. We have been invited to present at national conferences within the laboratatory animal field, and happily accepted. We see this as the best way to disseminate how successful these releases and adoptions can be, by working with the industry, not against it.

We designed our program to educate the public about laboratory research dogs as pets and we strive to bring our adopters some very special beagles when it comes to those dogs who so deserve a second chance at life.

Please check out the article entitled “Adoption Can be an Option for Animals after their Use in Research” by the Animal Welfare Institute’s AWI Quarterly to learn more about life after research!

Please see our F.A.Q page to learn more about these dynamic dogs who enrich our lives by being uniquely special.