Save the puppies!

Puppies. Cute, fuzzy puppies. Why would anyone – anyone with a soul, that is – ever want to hurt them?\nAlthough the primary cause for it has never been pure malice, animals have long been used in medical teaching laboratories to give students a hands-on opportunity to learn the ins and outs of mammalian anatomy without having to reach their not-yet practiced hands into a human body. The norm at most med schools used to be that canines were operated on to help students understand the cardiac system, and after students had examined the dogs’ hearts, they would dispose of their subjects. Because this time-honored tradition has been so widely used in the past, is it OK to use animals as test subjects and then dispose of them afterward? Does the potential of saving human lives justify turning dogs into guinea pigs, so to speak?\nAs much as we hate to think that anyone has to be used and, as in the case of the canine cardiac subjects, be discarded in order to train future medical practitioners, if animal experimentation can further medical practices and no alternative technology is available, it might have the potential to end the suffering of innumerable humans. While we by no means condone animal cruelty, if small-scale, scientifically based testing has the potential to prevent the deaths of someone’s grandparents, parents or siblings, it is very difficult to argue against it.\nAnimal experimentation has, in the past, been used to develop such crucial medical breakthroughs as the polio vaccine. When the polio epidemic was at its worst in 1952, nearly 60,000 Americans were infected and 3,000 people died, but when the vaccine had been widely administered, it was virtually eradicated from the United States. \nThink about the rampant mistreatment of animals in today’s world. Puppy farms and shelters continue to provide squalid living conditions for them, and everyone from pet owners who fail to adequately care for their animals or NFL stars (cough, hack) who exploit them for their own entertainment and financial gain are guilty of ill-use of “man’s best friend.” While millions of animals are literally wasting away in shelters or starving on the streets, is it really fair to single out medical experimentation, which has a viable purpose behind it, as one of the chief concerns for animal rights crusaders?\nDog lovers everywhere should celebrate, however, because by the end of February, all American medical schools will have phased out the use of dogs for surgical training in favor of echocardiogram technology that allows students to view the functioning of a human heart within live volunteers – no blood and guts required. \nOf course, if alternatives like this are available, we’ll certainly throw our puppy-loving hearts and souls into them. As technology improves on a daily basis, we’re confident that researchers will be able to develop other reliable, innovative options. So relax, Fluffy, the overall trend seems to imply that you’ll be all right as we strive to make animal rights and scientific progress go hand-in-hand.