Public debate over the use of dogs in laboratory experimentation resurfaced this week when the scientist behind controversial cardiac research on beagles and hounds said the animals “don’t suffer at all” and that dogs’ cardiovascular systems are “basically identical” to humans.
In an interview with the CBC, Frank Prato, the lead researcher who conducted the studies involving dogs for decades at the Lawson Research Institute inside St. Joseph’s Health Care, said the experiments — which lead to heart attacks in the animals lasting as long as three hours — are both ethical and save human lives.
In a follow-up radio interview Wednesday, he dismissed whistleblowers who came forward with allegations of animal mistreatment, saying, “They are not whistleblowers. We were not doing anything wrong. They were snitches.”
While dogs have become “our society’s companions,” he told the CBC, those pushing to end dog experimentation are endangering important medical advancements. “Where it gets ugly for me is the fact that now, we’re talking about one dog life being worth more than a million patients,” he said.
Prato’s comments are his first since an Investigative Journalism Bureau article, published last summer, triggered a shutdown of the dog testing program at St. Joseph’s and led to proposed legislation from the province that would ban the use of dogs and cats in most medical research in Ontario.
The ensuing debate has divided researchers, medical ethicists and the public.
Several researchers and lawyers, along with a former staff member in Prato’s lab and a former director of Western University’s animal care department, challenged his claims in interviews with the IJB this week.
It is “very misleading indeed” to suggest dogs don’t suffer pain from experiments that include heart attacks, said Eddie Clutton, chair of veterinary anaesthesiology at the University of Edinburgh, who is himself involved in research on animals.
Prato told the CBC the dogs were anesthetized so “unlike a human, who will suffer great pain during a heart attack, dogs don’t suffer at all.” He also told the broadcaster that heart attacks in dogs and humans both take about two hours to develop, which makes their cardiovascular systems “basically identical,” the CBC report reads.
Clutton said that while the dogs don’t suffer at the time of the heart attack, “they will as soon as they recover (from the anesthesia).”
And given their chests are surgically opened up for the procedure, “unless managed properly and intensively, that’s going to be a major cause of post-operative discomfort and suffering.”
Clutton said dogs very rarely experience heart attacks naturally. “The dogs we’re talking about in laboratories have perfectly healthy hearts until someone blocks them off, so the idea that they make a fantastic model is immediately challengeable.”
Prato did not respond to requests for an interview from the IJB this week or to detailed requests for comment last summer, before the IJB published the original investigation.
The IJB investigation revealed the decades-old dog experimentation, which whistleblowers said was shrouded in secrecy, in part by blasting music in the lab to drown out the sound of barking and removing their bodies in garbage bags.
Prato said that his work was not done in secret.
Naomi Charalambakis, a neuroscientist and director of science policy and communications at Americans for Medical Progress, which advocates for using animals in medical research, said the St. Joseph’s research was “devastating, and we don’t condone that.”
It does not, she said, reflect the “entire biomedical research field, and that’s not how every veterinarian and every scientist views their animals and views their research.”
Following the IJB’s reporting, Western University’s Animal Care Committee (ACC), which approved Prato’s research, and the Canadian Council on Animal Care (CCAC), which sets guidelines for animal use in scientific research in Canada, launched investigations.
The CBC story says both found allegations of wrongdoing in Prato’s dog research to be unsubstantiated, according to a memo the network said it obtained. CBC reported both investigations included site visits, records reviews and in-depth interviews with those directly involved in the program. They found that the study did not induce heart failure and the dogs were free of pain during the procedure, the CBC reported.
Whistleblower interviews and study protocols obtained by the IJB describe induced heart attacks in the dogs through blocking blood flow to the heart. That is distinct from heart failure, a gradual, chronic condition that interferes with the heart’s ability to pump blood efficiently.
Asked by the CBC about how researchers induced heart attacks in dogs, Prato said, “we take the dog and we have to reduce the blood flow to a region of the heart which would be similar, or exactly the same as what happens to someone during a heart attack, and then we release that obstruction.”
While the dogs were meant to survive the initial heart attack, the study protocols predicted up to half would not.
The review findings have not been made public. The IJB requested the reports from both the ACC and CCAC on Wednesday, but was not given copies.
In a statement, CCAC executive director Pierre Verreault confirmed the organization conducted a “special visit in relation to this research” but did not release the findings, citing confidentiality agreements.
There is no requirement for these reports to be made public in Canada.
St. Joseph’s said in a statement that it commissioned an independent third party to review the research involving animals at Lawson Research Institute following the IJB investigation last August.
It did not release a copy to the IJB. “The report from this review is being shared first with key stakeholders and will be made public in the coming weeks,” it reads. Officials from Western University did not respond to repeated interview requests.
Given that Western’s animal care committee was effectively reviewing its own approvals of Prato’s work dating back decades, its latest findings amount to “someone marking their own homework,” said the University of Edinburgh’s Clutton.
“They’re unlikely to say … we’ve made the wrong decisions consistently. So that’s bias (in the) evaluation of the decision-making process.”
Clutton also says keeping the details of animal study investigation findings from the public “raises suspicion.”
The CBC story says Western University reviewers found the dogs were “actively monitored by a clinical veterinarian at least four times a day to start, and then twice a day as recovery progressed” and that “animal care staff interacted with them several times a day to provide them with socialization activities.”
That description varies wildly from accounts of two whistleblowers who worked inside the lab before it was shut down and a former director of animal care at Western University. They describe animals whining in pain, caged alone for the vast majority of the day without socialization or exercise.
One of the whistleblowers, who spoke with the IJB this week, said Prato’s reassurances that the dogs are cared for appropriately are not accurate.
“I saw the dogs on a daily basis, and they were only socialized with humans for about 15 minutes every day,” they said. “What’s more is a lot of these dogs are housed individually.”
In his interview, Prato commented on videos captured by the whistleblowers and obtained by the IJB that show the dogs in various states of agitation and pain.
“I don’t know how they got the videos,” Prato said. “I don’t know if they provoked the animals to get the videos. As far as I’m concerned, there is nothing related to the truth in that story.”
The whistleblower interviewed this week said dogs were never given beds or bedding, and were only fed once a day. The person disagreed with Prato’s claim that dogs were monitored by clinical veterinarians, alleging they were only checked by veterinary technicians.
“I have never seen a veterinarian check on them directly after surgery, or in the 24 hours following the surgery,” the whistleblower said. The CBC story reported that the university’s review of the experiments found that the dogs were well cared for, with appropriate bedding, toys and nutrition, the review found.
A former director of Western University’s Department of Animal Care and Veterinary Services said veterinary oversight of the dogs every four hours “was not happening” during the years they were involved. Any oversight was done by veterinary technicians, and there were frequent concerns about the conditions in the Lawson Health Research Institute at St. Joseph’s where the dogs were housed, said the former director, who asked not to be named for fear of professional repercussions.
“Veterinarians would say they wouldn’t board their own dogs in a place like that.”
During approval reviews for Prato’s research, concerns raised by veterinarians on the animal care committee often carried little weight, the former director said.
“There’s an inherent bias in that the bulk of the committee are grant-funded researchers and the natural tendency is to be supportive of their peers … The perspective that veterinarians were meant to bring was not regarded with the vigour that we felt was appropriate for the circumstances.”
Ongoing secrecy around the investigation reports and inspections in Canada undermines public awareness and has to be addressed by governments, the former director said.
“Animal research has value, but it needs to be scrutinized and regulated to a higher standard than it is currently. We’ve barely moved from our standards in the 70s and 80s.”
In his CBC interview, Prato said the whistleblowers didn’t understand the behaviour they were seeing in the dogs, misinterpreting their whining and barking as an expression of pain.
The former director and veterinarian said the whistleblowers were part of Prato’s staff in the lab and “would have been trained to the expected standard. If he’s stating that, he is admitting that he or Lawson did not train the people appropriately.”
Clutton from the University of Edinburgh agrees: “Scientists, particularly principal investigators, are actually not part of the study. They sit in offices writing their next grant. And so they have very little experience of precisely what it is that’s happening to the animals involved.”
Camille Labchuk, a lawyer and executive director of animal rights organization Animal Justice, said her organization has found strong evidence that contradicts Prato’s assertions.
“This is a familiar PR strategy by animal researchers: focus on food, toys, and monitoring logs to distract from the central fact that animals are being deliberately harmed in ways that would be illegal outside a lab,” she said in a statement. “Periodic monitoring and brief staff interaction doesn’t erase the pain and suffering these dogs endured when given prolonged heart attacks, subjected to repeated invasive procedures, and ultimately killed.”
Charu Chandrasekera, founder of the Canadian Centre for Alternatives to Animal Methods, is a former research scientist who conducted cardiovascular research on mice before becoming an advocate for animal-free science.
She calls Prato’s assertion that one dog has the potential to save a million patients “unquantifiable, untraceable and unsupported by any demonstrable change in clinical practice.”
“Animal-based studies persist largely because they are shielded by grandiose promises of cures, biased peer review and box-ticking guidelines — not because they reliably translate to patient benefit.”
And dog hearts are not “basically identical” to a human heart, she says.
“Dogs share our homes — not our physiology.”
Ontario’s proposed legislation — Bill 75 — includes amendments to the Provincial Animal Welfare Services Act that would restrict invasive research on dogs and cats, except for specified purposes such as veterinary research.
The legislation defines invasive medical research as that which alters an animal’s “physical integrity,” causes “significant impact” to the animal’s physiological systems or results in moderate to severe pain, “extreme distress or death.”
Angela Fernandez, director of the Animal Law program at the University of Toronto, said despite the proposed legislation’s intent to ban invasive research on dogs and cats, researchers will be able to evade the ban.
“If the researcher denies, as Dr. Prato does here, that the experiments cause pain or claim that they cause only minimal pain, then the Animal Care Committee can determine that the experiments are not ‘invasive’ and they will likely be given a green, especially if they have approved the same kind of experiment for decades.”
Clutton, who says he has personal misgivings about his work in animal-based research, is hopeful that science will gradually find other ways.
“I don’t think we have a God-given right to take animals … I feel it’s wrong. I know it’s wrong deep down, but I do it because … if I didn’t do it, someone else might who doesn’t care as much or do the job as well…“I’d like to see a day, but I won’t, where we don’t need animals in research.”
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This story was also published in the London Free Press.