 Beagles are used in medical research to test the safety of new medicines. The beagles are kept together in pairs or small groups in pens. They are let out of their pens for regular exercise. Dogs are only occasionally used in medical research. Most research is done with mice, rats and zebrafish, with dogs making up less than one in a thousand of the animals used for research. But dogs are needed to test the safety of new medicines. And for research into conditions such as muscular dystrophy. The reason why beagles, as opposed to other varieties of dog are used, is largely an accident of history. Beagles are fairly small and easily managed. And these dogs have been used in an experiment. These dogs are on study currently and it's their time for exercise. They seem very happy coming out and running up and down the corridors and saying hello to everybody. Yes, they are. When a potential new medicine is being tested in animals, researchers need to be able to tell whether the drug is causing any unwanted side effects. This is done by measuring the drug's effect on the body while the dog is alive and by studying the dog's tissues after the dog is humanely killed. And where do the dogs come from? The dogs are all purpose bred for research and they come from licensed breeding establishments. In the last group as well there were two people with five dogs. It seems quite an intensive sort of human-to-dog ratio. Is that usual? Is that normal? Yes, we would normally have one or two technicians. We would never leave the dogs unsupervised. So here we've got some dogs that are going to be primatised to jackets. So this is for a jacketed external telemetry study. We've got an under jacket that will be placed onto the dog and then an over jacket. I like to see the dogs being shaved there in a couple of places. Is that so that something is going next to the skin? Yes, so we can put the pads on for the readings, the telemetry readings. There are many different ways of taking medical measurements with animals and researchers have worked hard to make this as comfortable as possible for the animals. So this is the under jacket. So the technicians will just reach each leg through the leg holes. Technical innovations now allow measurements to be taken by instruments that are outside the animal's body. In this case the measurements are taken through a jacket. So using the jackets means that the animal can be free roaming in its pen and there's no surgical techniques needed. The dog will be free to move around in its pen with its pen mate. And how long do they wear the jackets for when they're used to them? So it depends on the sleep design but normally up to a day. So the collar is just going on last there and that's so the animal doesn't turn around and start nibbling out the jacket and pull it off which could interfere with the experiment. So is this the first time this dog's been used in research? So where we can, where the study allows, we will reuse animals after a period where they've not had any procedures done to them. This dog's been used previously. These dogs have already taken part in medical trials and will take part in testing new medicines again. They are a bit lengthy these two, aren't they? The advantage of automatic monitoring is that the dogs can be left to live as usual and do not have to be picked up and restrained for medical measurements. Without research with dogs, we could never have made the breakthroughs that led to insulin for diabetes, drugs for heart disease and organ transplants. Treatments that have saved countless human lives.