Society

Smoking Beagles, 1974

It was not her coinage but Mary Beith, who died last month, provided an memorable photo behind the phrase, “Smoking Beagles”.   

In 1970, Dr. Oscar Auerbach revealed that he had trained 86 beagles to smoke and 20 of them developed cancers. It was an experiment that proved for the first time the link between large animals exposed to cigarette smoke and cancer; it caught the tobacco industry unaware and opened the floodgates as both sides frantically rushed to prove or disprove harmful effects of cigarettes via a frenzy of animal testing.

It was amidst this controversy that Mary Beith went to work for Imperial Chemical Industries in the summer of 1974, but she was different from other workers. She had been engaged by The Sunday People in Manchester to work undercover at various animal research laboratories. She chose ICI’s Macclesfield labs for the simple reason that it was close to her home.

She could not produce her insurance cards (which would betray her journalistic background) so she pretended they had been mislaid. It was just perhaps the trusting nature of those days, but the company gave her three days to find them or face dismissal. Inside, she saw beagles forced inhale as many as 30 cigarettes in a day to test ‘safe’ non-nicotine cigarettes, called New Smoking Material.

A darkroom was set up in a van parked near the lab and Beith was given a tiny camera, which she concealed in her bra. But when she took the film back, staff laughed at her efforts, one telling her: “The next time you take pics of those beagles, Mary, please be sure to take your finger off the lens!”

The next day, she smuggled in a larger camera and took the photo above. The paper sat on the story for several months until publishing it on 26th January 1975 on the frontpage. It coincided with Richard Ryder’s powerful book against animal testing, Victims of Science. These incidents provoked strong and violent backlashes from animal rights activists, and with the imprisonment of two such figures from the Animal Liberation Front, a new chapter in animal rights law would soon open.

As for Mary Beith, she won an award as campaigning journalist of that year; ironically for the reporter best remembered for an anti-tobacco story, she was a lifelong smoker and died last month after a long battle with an aggressive form of lung cancer.

Liked it? Take a second to support Iconic Photos on Patreon!
Iconic Photos

Iconic Photos is a weekly series of blog posts that aims to educate readers about history, culture, and global politics using the medium of photos and photography. Since 2009, we have produced over 1,000 blog posts, and covered a wide variety of topics -- historical, political, artistic, criminal, moral, psychological, sartorial, financial, and scientific aspects of issues and ideas around photographic arts, from over 90 countries.

View Comments

  • dónde encontrar medicamentos en Suiza Liomont Puerto Asís medicijnen kopen in Nederlandse online apotheek

  • Betrouwbare online apotheek voor medicijnen SMB Puerto Berrío precio del medicamentos en una farmacia en Argentina

  • Los logos y marcas de cada servicio expuesto en este website son propiedad de Servicio Técnico Oficial Zanussi MADRID y SAT oficial Zanussi MADRID , estando protegidos por las Leyes del Copyright,así como nuestros técnicos estan especializados en el Servicio Técnico y reparación de la marca Zanussi. Siemens dispone de una completa red de delegaciones, con técnicos expertos, a lo largo de todo el país.

  • Does nobody else care about how they were tortured? They were held against their will, and put into straight jackets and forced to smoke. How are you capable of doing horrible things to dogs? Actually, animals in general?

  • I've been surfing online more thasn 2 hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours.

    It's prestty worfh enough for me. Personally, if all
    web owners and bloggers made good content as you did, the web will be a lot more useful than ever before.

  • Right now it sounds like Expression Engine
    is the best blogging platform available right
    now. (from what I've read) Is that what you're using on your blog?

  • 21, neighbors had warned law enforcement as early as four months
    prior to the deaths of the horses that animals kept
    getting out of their pastures and no food was available on their own property.

    In mud, they're going to slip and slide and get bogged down. However, thankfully,
    learning organisations are springing up everywhere; challenging the
    status quo; adapting to rather than denying or avoiding critical situations and issues.

  • These days poker tournaments usually have prize pools in the thousands of dollars and huge earning opportunities.

    Sitting down at a real world cassino play Texas Hold'em, you will frequently see a lot of players re-depositing funds
    instead of cashing out. While men often view poker as something that defines their
    own value and self-esteem, poker girls approach the game with a much more open mind and
    a true thirst for learning and becoming better.

  • It could do with a little tele foreplay just to get matters straight and flowing.
    -- Mood changes may be "medicated" (hidden) through the use of
    other drugs or m. The split exists from inadequate parenting which results in structural deficits in the personality.

1 2 3 4
Share
Published by
Iconic Photos

Recent Posts

The Truth about the Beijing Turmoil

Busy was the Chinese Communist Party in the first few days after it brutally suppressed…

5 months ago

Tiananmen – The Sunday Times Magazine, 1989

Four months after the massacre, as the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe also looking increasingly…

5 months ago

The Problem that makes all Europe Wonder – Picture Post, 1945

This was the third major story Picture Post published on the Holocaust, after the liberations…

5 months ago

The Problem that makes all Europe Wonder – Picture Post, 1945

When Nordhausen concentration camp in Thuringia was liberated by the 104th US Infantry Division on…

5 months ago

The 8th Army Breaks Open a Concentration Camp in Italy – Picture Post, 1943

Six weeks after Mussolini's downfall, in September 1943, the British 8th Army liberated an Italian…

5 months ago

Hell and High Water by Jonas Karlsson, Vanity Fair, 2005

After the levees gave way in New Orleans, editors and photographers from Vanity Fair waded…

5 months ago