Excerpts:
The scientific director and vice president of research at Lawson Research Institute has left the organization, a week after it emerged that clandestine cardiac tests were being performed on dogs at St. Joseph’s Hospital, prompting public outcry.
Her departure comes days after St. Joseph’s publicly announced it would immediately end research studies on dogs, following consultations with the province. Ontario Premier Doug Ford said Monday that he was “deeply disturbed” by the research.
During an announcement in Windsor on Tuesday, Ford went further, promising to introduce legislation that would ban testing on certain animals in the province, prompting concerns about political interference in scientific research.
St. Joseph’s initially defended the research after the Investigative Journalism Bureau (IJB), based out of the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, revealed dogs had been used for years as part of a heart study at Lawson.
Published in partnership with Postmedia, the report said researchers from Lawson had been inducing heart attacks as long as three hours in dogs and puppies as part of research aimed at accurately imaging post-heart attack injury and healing.
CBC News has not independently verified the reports from IJB.
Sourced from U.S. breeders, IJB said the dogs, some as young as 10 months, would be wheeled into the hospital in blanket-covered crates and taken to a lab on the hospital’s sixth floor. Loud music would be blared to drown out their barking.
The dogs would be euthanized, and their hearts removed for further study, the report said, citing two whistleblowers.
St. Joseph’s has said the research was conducted to “learn more about how to accurately image post-heart attack injury and healing that we cannot yet decipher using other models,” including artificial intelligence.
I’m confused. Was what they were doing illegal? Did they not have permission to euthanize and study these dogs? If not, then yes, she should resign.
If they had permission though, then I really don’t see the issue. We kill a lot of animals for research, a LOT of animals. Dogs, ferrets, monkeys, pigs, rats, mice… God, so many mice… And yet it’s still a drop in the bucket compared to the meat industry, and it actually serves a purpose. I’m way more ok with an animal dying to study heart disease than I am for it dying to make meat that 40% of will be thrown away because no one buys it.
If this is just public outcry from a vocal minority that have just now realized that medical research requires a blood cost, then I truly do not give a shit. We should not capitulate to children throwing a tantrum because they suddenly realized how the medical sausage is made. Despite their intentions, they are literally arguing to halt any medical advancement.
Maybe one day we can have lab grown human organs that are better than live animals for research. But until that time, animal sacrifice is REQUIRED for medical research. The alternative is human subjects, which I think everyone can agree is worse.
Hmm. Because they’re companion animals, a lot of people tend to be more concerned about what happens to dogs and cats than they do about livestock, lab mice, etc., so that may be part of it. They might have gotten less outcry if they’d been using pigs.
But I would bet you that the main problem here was that the scientists were trying to keep it quiet. It makes the research look shady, regardless of its value. If they’d been doing this work at a separate facility with no particular secrecy rather than sneaking live dogs into a human hospital and trying to hide them, chances are no one would have noticed.
Unbelievable ignorance.
