MBR Acres
Marshall BioResources have breeding facilities in the USA, France, China, Japan and the UK. At their various breeding sites, MBR breed ferrets, mice, guinea pigs, cats, mini pigs and dogs.
In the UK, is MBR Acres, where they breed over 2,000 beagles a year in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, as well as B&K Universal in Hull, where they breed ferrets, guinea pigs, rats and mice. The Home Office has granted both of these companies a licence to harvest and sell blood, internal organs and other body fluids from dogs and other animals.
At MBR Acres, there are over 1,000 dogs at any one time, kept in inhumane conditions and sold at just a few weeks old to laboratories in the UK for toxicology testing. The conditions in which the dogs are bred fail to meet their most basic welfare needs, yet MBR’s practices are completely legal.
- The beagles are kept inside industrial, windowless sheds under a strict regime of 12 hours of artificial light and 12 hours of darkness. The dogs are never allowed outdoors; they do not know what it is like to sit in the sunshine, walk on grass, or feel the rain on their fur.
- The dogs, including pregnant beagles, newly born pups and weaning puppies, are left completely unattended inside locked sheds for 16 hours from Monday to Friday. At weekends and bank holidays, a small team of about five to six workers attends for a four-hour check, leaving the dogs unattended for up to 20 hours a day. However, we have witnessed occasions when the dogs were left unattended for as long as 23 hours.
- The dogs are kept in pens with wet, filthy concrete floors covered in faeces and sawdust to soak up some of the urine. There is no bedding, and the only form of enrichment they have is a single toy hanging from a chain.
- They are so deprived of the most basic welfare requirements that when undercover cameras were placed inside the sheds for only a few minutes, they recorded many dogs displaying signs of pathological behaviour, such as aimlessly pacing up and down the pens and eating each other’s faeces.
