The following excerpt is taken from Lauren A. Colby’s bookĀ In Defense of Smokers.
Chapter 9: Smoking Animals
Remember the smoking beagles? Movietone News, the old newsreel company, featured a piece on these cute little dogs, shot some time in the 1950’s or 60’s. It’s sometimes re-run on late night TV, even today.
Actually, the experiment was rather cruel (although not nearly so much so as later ones). The beagles were strapped side-by-side to a long bench, in a rather unnatural upright position. They were fitted with face masks, which forced them to inhale and exhale smoke from lighted cigarettes. A mechanical device lit a new cigarette and dropped it into the air line, as soon as an old one was used up. Although the Surgeon General later claimed that the smoking machines did not force animals to inhale and exhale deeply, the newsreel footage sure made it look as if the dogs were inhaling and exhaling very deeply.
It was, perhaps, the smoking Beagles that were referred to in the 1964 SG’s Report, when the Committee made the observation that with the “possible exception of dogs”, the animal experiments had all failed to induce lung cancers. Whatever the case, in theĀ 1971Ā Report, the Surgeon General conceded that the experiments with dogs, using smokingĀ machines, had failed. However, also in the 1971 Report, the SG described a new experiment, conducted by a government physician, Oscar Auerbach, and others, in which the Beagles were forced to smoke in what the SG described as a “more natural” manner…
