COLUMN: See Spot Croak

From Bertie Bregman's "On Call," Fall '93 Nevertheless, I was troubled by a pharmacology lab last week, which used a canine model to teach us about surgical anesthesia. When I entered the room, the anesthesiologist and two student volunteers had already hooked the dog up to the machine, and it lay on its back, legs spread apart, bent at the knees. Although unconscious, it breathed on its own, and its chest rose and fell rhythmically. For the next three hours, we administered various drugs to the dog – narcotics, sedatives, muscle relaxants – and measured physiological parameters such as blood pressure and heart rate. Before leaving, we killed him by flooding his heart with potassium. I don't know much about dogs so I couldn't identify the breed, but it was average sized, probably a mutt, mostly black with patches of white hair. It looked exactly like my friend's dog, Erin, who launches herself at visitors and then races around the house, peeing on the kitchen floor in excitement over seeing a strange face. I didn't rack my brain for that association; it came to me immediately. You can't grow up in America without knowing a dog – whether it be a pet, a neighborhood stray, or Scoobie-Doo. Hell, I even had Underdog sheets. It may seem irrational to privilege dogs over other animals, such as rabbits or rats. I once saw a film about a family of Cambodian refugees living in California, who cooked their dog and ate it – a perfectly natural thing to do in Cambodia – sparking hysterical protests and a flood of racist hate mail. The filmmaker went on to contrast the public outrage at this event with scenes from a slaughterhouse, leaving you with a sense of the absurdity of such drawing sharp ethical distinctions between a dog and a cow. For better or worse, though, we like dogs in our culture. We live and play with them. They protect us and show blind people around. Many of us feel closer to dogs than we do to strange human beings. So you can't kill a dog in a lab without sending out a strong message: science can do in the light of day what our neighbors would be lynched for doing in their basements or backyards. Of course, we have good reasons for what we do. In this case, what better way to learn about the physiological effects of anesthesia than by demonstration? What better way to grasp the hazards of drug dosage than by example? Using a real dog drives home the point that our mistakes and decisions will affect real people's lives. Under scrutiny, though, these arguments don't hold up, especially if the dog's life has intrinsic value. The dog lab didn't teach us anything we couldn't have learned from case studies or non-living models. In fact, part of this lab included a water-tank model that I thought was more elegant and informative than the dog model. And before we hold a human life in our hands in the hospital, we will see countless surgeries, witness countless weighty decisions, and have countless opportunities to realize the gravity of our responsibility as doctors. When speaking about killing a laboratory animal, scientists use the word "sacrifice," which has various definitions. They would define it as "the forfeiture of something of value for something of greater value or claim". What you add to medical knowledge is more valuable than the animal's life. But what about when you add nothing new to medical knowledge, when you merely illustrate something that you already know? Are we still "sacrificing" the animal? Is that still the proper term? I would say it is, but now more simply defined as: "to sell or give away at a loss". The urge to demonstrate what we already know always seems more compelling when technology is involved, a point which I can perhaps best illustrate with an anecdote. When I was little – six or seven years old – my brothers and I discovered that a magnifying glass could focus sunlight into a white-hot ray. This seemed marvelous to us, and we promptly went out to experiment by frying crickets. We stalked them, stunned them by hurling them onto the street, and then roasted them with our magnifying glass. I know most of us have similar stories. A close friend, now an exemplary Buddhist, put the neighbor's cat through an entire washer and dryer cycle when she was a child. Another friend, Henry, used squirrels and robins for target practice when his parents gave him a wrist-rocket slingshot for his tenth birthday. Learning how to master newfound technologies by using them against other living things seems to be an almost universal stage of development. On one level, children are just plain cruel. But on another, they have a genuine curiosity about what will happen. More accurately, they know what will happen, but they want to see it for themselves. They want to test the limits of their power over the world around them. I knew, even as a little boy, that magnifying the sun onto a cricket would burn it. Henry knew that firing a rock at a bird would kill it (in the rare event that he hit it). And all of us in lab knew what would happen to the dog under our experimental conditions. But knowing is never enough. We had just learned all about these new drugs, and we wanted to see them work. Along with the knowledge and technology of medicine comes an almost irresistable temptation to try everything out. We have mountains of data on drug actions, but if they were developed to use on biological organisms, then let's pack up the books and give 'em a whirl! During a drug's development, of course, this impulse is justified. You can't test a drug on people without some idea of its biological effects, and animals can tell us what we need to know. Which brings us to the central paradox of animal experiments. Biologically, we see them as models of ourselves, while ethically we deny even the slightest resemblance. So the dog lab illuminates three dilemmas. A gap exists between society's love for dogs and their casual role in the lab. Another gap exists between the seduction of technology and its humane use. A third gap exists between our biological and ethical perception of animals in relation to ourselves. Extremists are unlikely to bridge these gaps. Most of us agree that while animals' lives have more than commodity value, a person is more precious than a rat or a bug. Rather, we need some way to better join society's values with the legitimate goals of science. Don't ban animal experimentation, but resort to it only when no creative alternative exists. Bertie Bregman is a second-year Medical School student from New York, New York. On Call appears alternate Thursdays.