As a physician, researcher and dog lover — and someone who once reluctantly experimented on dogs — I believe that a new investigation of Department of Defense animal testing highlights the need for legislation to cut wasteful government spending on painful, deadly and unnecessary experiments on man’s best friend.
Of all the animals used in research, the subjection of dogs to invasive experiments is especially condemnable, because humans have selectively bred dogs to unconditionally love the very people who sometimes abuse them. For instance, one government website states, “Most of the dogs used in research are beagles due to their convenient size and docile nature.”
After three decades, I’m still ashamed to say I was once convinced to participate in this betrayal. In medical school, I was instructed to cut apart and kill dogs — a Golden Retriever and a black Lab — for physiology demonstrations and surgical practice. I did it, qualms of conscience notwithstanding, because I was told it was necessary.
It turns out that this wasn’t true. It has never been the case that doctors could better serve our patients if we killed more dogs. In fact, we never needed to kill any. It was just a bad habit of old-school professors that had become institutionalized. I helped end this at my university, and no U.S. medical schools use animals to train medical students anymore.
A similar inertia currently pervades biomedical research. Despite decades of futility and countless billions in taxpayers’ money wasted, hapless dogs are still the first resort of some entrenched experimenters at federal agencies.
A new investigation released by the nonprofit organization where I volunteer reveals that the Defense Department is funding a $949,108 drug safety test on beagles that began last year and is scheduled to run until July 31.
In this three-month U.S. Army study of an experimental drug for ALS, beagles will be repeatedly forced to ingest large doses of the test compound, ostensibly to gain approval for human trials from the Food and Drug Administration.
These tests typically involve thrusting a tube down dogs’ throats to pump the drugs directly into their stomachs. The procedure, which amounts to poisoning, often causes the dogs to vomit, convulse and bleed.
In some cases, puppies as young as one week old have been abused in drug safety tests. Some dogs have their mouths taped shut so they can’t regurgitate the drugs, and some have their vocal cords cut so they can’t bark or cry out in the lab.
At the end of testing, these hapless dogs are killed and dissected.
Ethics aside, the scientific problem with this research is that dogs are not just simplified versions of humans. Even the Defense Department reports that “animal models have limited relevance to humans and poorly predict effects in humans.” I have published research demonstrating how animal models of ALS consistently fail to forecast outcomes in humans.
The use of dogs specifically in drug safety tests is especially egregious and unnecessary. The FDA has stated clearly that it “does not mandate that human drugs be studied in dogs.” We also have superior research technologies, such as human organs-on-chips, to model ALS and test drugs to treat it.
Unfortunately, old habits die hard, and federal agencies have proven that they won’t evolve on their own. But the battle against beagle abuse has been a bipartisan success story.
In recent years, Congress has enacted legislation directing the Department of Veterans Affairs to eliminate all of its dog experiments. Similarly, a new bipartisan federal bill would end all painful testing on dogs and cats funded by the National Institutes of Health.
The Department of Defense also recognizes that dogs are in a league of their own. Since the 1980s, following a public outcry, the Pentagon has prohibited weapons and wound experiments on dogs, but a loophole still allows them to be abused in drug safety tests and other kinds of experiments. Lawmakers should use the National Defense Authorization Act as a vehicle to fix that problem.
I can never repay the karmic debt I incurred by needlessly killing those dogs in medical school. But I urge Congress to take action to end wasteful government spending on flawed research that involves the betrayal of creatures who are hopelessly hard-wired to depend upon the kindness and mercy of human strangers.
Lawrence Hansen, M.D., a volunteer advisor to the nonprofit White Coat Waste Project, is a professor of pathology and neurosciences at the University of California-San Diego School of Medicine.