Dr. Murray’s Lawyers Ordered Experiments on Dogs
We may never know whether Dr. Conrad Murray caused the death of singer Michael Jackson. But in order to prove he didn’t, Murray’s defense team commissioned experiments that involved the poisoning deaths of beagles.
According to a report in RadarOnline, Murray’s defense team ordered up a series of experiments to determine how much Propofol would have to be ingested to cause Michael Jackson’s death.
The online news magazine quotes a “source close to Dr. Murray” as saying that “a study was done on beagle dogs to determine how much Propofol would have to be orally consumed to cause death. The only other study that had been done on the oral ingestion of Propofol was on pigs rectums. The study definitely involved more than two dogs. It’s unknown if the dogs died, or suffered any harm.”
In typical toxicology tests, large doses of chemicals are fed or injected into animals to determine what dosage kills the victims. Leaving aside the irony of Michael Jackson’s professed love of animals, tests like this one could have been completely unnecessary to any defense since plenty of data are publicly available about the oral toxicity of propofol in dogs, humans, and other animals.
Beagles are used in vivisection laboratories because they don’t put up much of a fight. Since they’re calm and placid, they don’t bark or howl, and they often even treat the people who inflict enormous pain and suffering on them as friends, they make ideal subjects for breeding, experimenting on, and then killing.
The animal rights group PETA has filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) saying that if Murray’s attorneys did indeed commission such tests, this would have been in violation of the federal Animal Welfare Act’s prohibition against tests on animals that “unnecessarily duplicate previous experiments.
The RadarOnline report is here. And you can read the PETA press statement here.