I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

It's really a shocking statistic, but more than 95% of the drugs that show promise in animals end up not working

for humans because either they're toxic or they're just not effective. So that's billions of

dollars that are spent on these animals. And animals are not having their best lives in the lab.

They are not being their mouse selves or dog selves. It's not a good existence. And then we have

nothing to show for it. That's Melanie Kaplan. After adopting a beagle that had spent the first four years of his life as an experimental

subject in the laboratory, she set out with Hammie, the Beagle, to explore the murky

world of animal experimentation.

She tells the story of her travels and her discoveries in a new book, Lab Dog.

Well, you have had an interesting communication problem, which is to be so emotionally attached to the hero of your story, and at the same time stick to very strict standards of journalism. And I think you do a

beautiful job of it. How did you get involved with Hammy? And how did Hammy get that name?

So Hanney is short for Alexander Hamilton. He was actually rescued from a laboratory in 2013 with six other dogs,

and the organization named them all for founding fathers. And how did I get involved? You know,

I first thought I was just going to be fostering Hammy, and you know how that goes.

It was not long before I adopted him.

And so I had this dog, and I knew he was from a lab in Virginia, and that's all I knew.

And for many years, I would introduce him to people, and I would say, this is Hammy.

He spent several years in a lab, and I would show people the tattoo that he had in his ear.

He had a tattoo with a number of letters in his left ear.

And that's really as far as I went with things, I realized at some point that I needed to write about this.

And I've been a journalist for almost 30 years, and I wanted to approach this issue

with a journalist's eye and rigorously report it and see if I could present it in a way that it wouldn't be

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