Nikki_Steendam
Beagle Freedom Australia officially launched in 2013, but we’ve been rehoming beagles and hounds since the early 2000’s. We are based in Victoria, but we work Australia wide. We specialise in beagles and scent hounds retired from medical research, but help any animal that we can. Over the years we’ve helped several thousand animals and we advocate for better conditions and legislative changes to better their lives as often as we can. We want to see an end of the use of animals in all forms of research.
Rehoming Animals From Research
We’ll be speaking as the co-founders of Beagle Freedom Australia, on how we started and what keeps us going. So many people think that Australia doesn’t use animals for medical research and when they find out that we do, they are shocked. We were the same.
After rescuing and rehoming beagles for nearly 8 years, we got a call from someone who sat on an Animal Ethics Committee, saying they had some beagles they wanted to rehome who had come from the research facility that they worked alongside. We immediately agreed to take them in. This sparked a passion in us, and we’ve made it our mission to get as many of these animals out of research at the end of their time instead of letting them die there.
It goes without saying that we would love if they could stop using animals completely, but what could we possibly do to make this happen? We have the skills to find amazing homes for animals, so we thought we’d start there. It was an immediate action we could take to prevent animals from being killed needlessly.
