Ms. Bea had several important jobs at the pound. One of them was to rise from her bed at the front desk and greet frightened dogs who were being cast off by their owners. When they saw her moving toward them with such self-assurance, obviously well fed, totally at home and happy as a clam, they stopped shaking and began wagging their tails.

Ms. Bea worked long hours and loved every minute. She ate what we ate—Indian take-out was her favorite—and she rode the truck into the “best” and the most troubled neighborhoods, looking out the window at them all. I loved her very much.

She only fell down on the job once, but I couldn’t blame her because by that time, she was very old, had lost her hearing and was inclined to nap a lot. One very late winter night, some men decided to mug me as I was getting back into my van. It was only because I immediately saw them coming—one with a tire iron in his hand—and because I used to run the heater for Ms. Bea with an extra key in the ignition, that I escaped. Oblivious to the commotion, Ms. Bea slept through it. I never told her about the incident. It would have been a terrible blow.

Ms. Bea was 17 years old when she died. I still think of her often, a dignified old girl who knew she looked silly when she carried her green plastic frog in her mouth, a dear friend and loving companion. When people ask me how anyone can justify breaking into labs and “stealing” the animals, all I know is that if anyone had Ms. Bea on the dissection table, I’d be through that door in a minute, lock me up if you will.

They are all Ms. Bea, in their own way, aren’t they? Even the smallest of them, the ugliest or weirdest of them.

I remember thinking exactly that when I toured the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) Poolesville Primate Laboratory one morning.

Entering a barren room in a seemingly endless corridor of barren white-washed rooms, I found a baboon. I actually heard him first because he was banging his head so loudly against the solid steel sides of his cage.

In this totally sterile, dull, windowless environment, he was so alive and so gaudy, almost surreal: a huge hydramus baboon, the size of a small man. He had a long dog snout that looked as if he had painted it with crazy red and pink and white and grey stripes. His long multicolored hair stood out from his body like a big colorful cloak. You could imagine him on his way to a costume party.

How must he have felt when aliens snatched him from his jungle and transported him to this cold lonely world to die in a steel cage? Most primates avoid making eye contact, yet this baboon stared straight at me. His eyes were filled not with despair, as one might expect, but with deep loathing.

I made enquiries and my questions became embarrassing for NIH. It transpired that the baboon and several others in his “group” had been forgotten. Originally shipped to the U.S. from Russia, they had been used for eight years in a cancer study. The study had been casually abandoned when the principal investigator had taken a job in another state. The baboons would have been hosed down in their metal boxes and fed “monkey biscuits” until the day they died. I pushed for a resolution. Eventually NIH told me it had found no further use for the animals and had killed them. I hoped it was true—what an indictment of society’s treatment of animals.

My regular visits to NIH’s primate complex made the researchers there stop and think about the nastier aspects of their work, rather than simply conduct business as usual. I knew that each one had the potential to have a change of heart and at every opportunity I reminded them that it is possible to find other ways to make a living.

Dr. Roger Ulrich did. For years, he had experimented on monkeys and received many professional awards and honors for his hideously cruel experiments, using monkeys and rats to study the relationship between pain and aggression. In one experiment, he used electric shocks intense enough to cause paralysis. One group of rats could not stand even half this intensity and several died.

One day, Dr. Ulrich wrote this to the American Psychological Association: “When I was asked why I conducted these experiments, I used to say it was because I wanted to help society solve its problems of mental illness, crime, retardation, drug abuse, child abuse, unemployment, marital unhappiness, alcoholism, over-smoking, over-eating...even war! Although, after I got into this line of work, I discovered that the results of my work did not seem to justify its continuance. I began to wonder if perhaps financial rewards, professional prestige, the opportunity to travel, etc., were the maintaining factors and if we of the scientific community, supported by our bureaucratic and legislative systems, were actually part of the whole problem.

“One spring I was asked by a colleague, ‘Dr. Ulrich, what is the most innovative thing that you’ve done professionally over the past year?’ I replied, ‘Dear Dave, I’ve finally stopped torturing animals.’”