What we need is auditing and enforcement of our already comprehensive ethical restrictions on scientific research across fields. He’s using this one instance of gross negligence and misconduct to attack science in general, rather than do the proper job of enforcing the regulatory apparatus. Why is he doing this? Attention and optics to distract from his massive failures and bad ideas and investments, and also his side dealing which is getting harder and harder to ignore.
Ford wants to use cyclists instead. They’re not people like dogs are.
Bad incidents with dogs and cats? 0
Bad incidents with belligerent cyclists: 2
One group appears to be more civilized.
Exactly my point.
Tbf, we only get belligerent after enduring so much shit from carheads and pedestrians. I guarantee you I can’t commute downtown for 10 minutes without having some car parked in my late or an entitled pedestrian walking or standing there without regard.
Not to mention the shit people have thrown at me consciously or not, and the times I’ve almost gotten run over while doing what I’m supposed to be doing and still getting honked and yelled at.
What makes dogs and cats special?
Nothing, but in the Anglosphere people think there is. It’s a perfect culture war to pick in a way, because you can’t argue killing dogs is cool, and nuanced points about human attitudes to animals are very easy to shout over.
Wait I had no idea this was even allowed to begin with
That led to an article published earlier this month that found the dogs — mostly puppies — were used for tests and killed before their internal organs were removed for further examination.
What the fuck?
Pretty standard practice for animal research. Mainly mice and rats, but some types of research are better modeled by different animals.
Do you know what the laws are like in other provinces or countries?
There are national regulations covering animal research under the legislating body, the CCAC.
This. (For people who aren’t familiar with them) Regulations are also very strict to ensure the animals are cared for very well and not in pain, etc.
I’m not all for animal testing, but for some things it’s still necessary, sadly.
People are researching many alternatives to reduce animal experimentation as much as possible.
It’s baffling. I want to know each province’s laws now.
Incredibly shortsighted and he’s demonstrating his ignorance of the laws of his own country.
What is the decision framework they used that led to them approving inducing 3hr heart attacks in beagle puppies before killing them?
People here seem happy to have blind faith in the system when it produced results that are objectively horrific. I would genuinely like to understand what the cost/benefit analysis was, what alternatives methods of research were considered, and why they weren’t viable.
This was a particular research group that was flaunting the laws, it’s far from the standard. You’re embellishing it into some kind of trend when you have no understanding how scientific research is conducted or enforced in this country, it’s absolutely not that, and if you want to pearl clutch you should be looking toward Ford’s constant attacks on municipalities and environmental standards to get his cut from developer friends, full stop.
Animals can only be used in research when there is convincing scientific justification, when expected benefits outweigh potential risks, and when scientific objectives cannot be achieved using non-animal methods. In Canada, there is federal and provincial legislation overseeing the humane treatment of animals.
This type of intervention makes scientific evidence appear secondary to partisan political opinion, weakening the integrity of the research enterprise. Moreover, such actions embolden activist campaigns that often misrepresent the reality of modern animal research and are usually counterproductive. These campaigns frequently ignore or sidestep the strict welfare standards and regulatory requirements that govern research facilities, as well as the medical breakthroughs that benefit both human and animal health.
Blah blah blah.
Again, tell me the specific justification in this case, given what they were doing to beagle puppies.
I’m not interested in just hand waving it away and saying “trust the system”. If the system produces horrific results, the system should be able to openly justify why they were necessary.
The WHOLE POINT is that it was NOT justified in this or any case! Someone broke the law AND all strictly developed regulatory practices! You should be focusing on the individual who committed the offense and tortured animals, not attacking science in Canada, and I’d argue you don’t even care about research at all and are just reacting to an emotional headline for clout.
Get off the internet. The paranoia and brain rot is showing.
Dogs are a particularly useful model for heart problems in humans because they naturally get several of the same conditions and diseases humans do. You can try to create genetic variants of mice to have these conditions but it’s not nearly as good as a species that naturally experiences the condition. You may waste hundreds of mouse lives for poor quality research that way.
All studies involving animals require ethical approval involving a detailed assessment of the protocol by a committee that must include veterinarians, managers of the facility (not the lab members but outside of the research team), technicians who work directly with the animals, other researchers doing unrelated work, and a community member otherwise uninvolved in research at all. This is just for the ethical approval, they will also have to go through scientific merit evaluation by a different committee before this step. They must lay out exactly what they are doing and why it is necessary and how they are mitigating pain and distress. They may be under anesthesia for the entire heart attack, and then euthanized without waking up, or receive painkillers and be monitored constantly by a veterinarian. If they don’t do this, the work wont happen, and results wont be publishable either. Without being at that meeting we can’t know the exact technical justification, but there is a very strict process to follow and often everyone has more feelings about it when they are companion animals and they receive a lot of scrutiny.
I’m not all for animal research, some of it is poorly done and wasteful and doesn’t have any practical use. Or the data suffers from human incompetence. But a lot of it does help humans and animals. And there is a lot more tendency to intervene on pain and distress than you’d think - a distressed animal with no pain mitigation is not a good representation for your average human receiving treatment for something at a hospital. Your average local veterinary clinic almost certainly sees far worse cases of neglect and festering horrifying injuries and disease at the hands of incompetent dog owners than a study like this would ever produce.
I understand that, but all of that boils down to “trust the bureaucratic system”.
It’s inherently problematic that the justifications for animal research trials are not required to be publicly posted. If the justification is legitimate, you should feel comfortable defending it publicly.
Keeping it secret and gatekept to the scientists in the field means that the broader public has no real input or say on topics that are not just purely scientific, but deeply moral and ethical.
Virtually every scientist I’ve ever known has been a deeply moral person, but at a broader scale, there have been enough scientific studies that have been used to abuse people and animals, that their shouldn’t be a culture of ‘trust us scientists, we always know what the right thing is’. There should be a culture of open transparency and verification.
Also, if you are passionate and interested in this kind of thing, consider reaching out to a local institutional Animal Care Committee to see if they have a spot open for a community member! You’d have to sign a confidentiality agreement at this point in time but maybe you would find something like that very interesting. Many institutions have a stipend for the time spent attending meetings and stuff, it can be quite a time sink for just a volunteer position.
I absolutely agree. There is a push for more openness and transparency in animal research, it is a major initiative of the CCAC for rollout over the next 5 years. There is a lot of fear of animal rights activist groups and litigation or harassment from them that I think is generally unfounded - those incidents are pretty rare. Unfortunately, situations like this with Doug Ford only stoke the fear and protectionist attitudes that need to be broken down… now people in this field feel more targeted and scared and less likely to speak to the public. It’s very counterproductive.
https://ccac.ca/en/animals-used-in-science/transparency/institutional-transparency.html
There is a lot of fear of animal rights activist groups and litigation or harassment from them that I think is generally unfounded - those incidents are pretty rare.
I get the fear, but do also agree it feels unfounded. If farmers and slaughterhouses manage to get by, it seems like animal research labs should be able to too.
They said they told him how researchers would induce hours-long heart attacks as part of efforts to improve medical imaging processes for humans.
If only you’d bother actually reading the whole article, the same phrase you took a bit from actually explains why they do that. But no, better to just attack the whole thing pretending we do that for fun.
That is not a justification, that’s a hand wave. That sentence answers literally none of my questions.
It does, maybe it’s just not precise enough for you, but it does. Medical imaging for humans. What do you actually want?
I don’t believe you’re here to argue in good faith anyway.
Edit: I also notice that you carefully avoided another answer that goes into much more details than mine. Yeah you’re not here in good faith.
Edit: I also notice that you carefully avoided another answer that goes into much more details than mine. Yeah you’re not here in good faith.
I replied to yours first because it was shorter and easier, I was literally replying to them when you made your edit. You need to spend less time on the internet.
And here are the specific questions I asked which again, that sentence does not answer:
I would genuinely like to understand what the cost/benefit analysis was, what alternatives methods of research were considered, and why they weren’t viable.
So in general, research on animals is a step before research on humans. That’s as simple as that. It costs more to do experimentation on humans, and it’s also more dangerous (to humans). But you didn’t need the article for that, any simple research online would have given you that answer.
I maintain that you are not arguing in good faith here.
Edit: There’s a bit more information on this article from the CBC, notably with the following:
Other effective models don’t yet exist for this specific line of inquiry that connects the metabolic and cellular mechanisms that can lead to, or prevent, a heart attack or heart failure with non-invasive imaging techniques.
I maintain that you are not arguing in good faith here.
I maintain that you think that because you spend too much time on the internet and don’t talk to people in real life. Irl people have opinions that don’t all fall in lock step with the hive mind.
So in general, research on animals is a step before research on humans. That’s as simple as that. It costs more to do experimentation on humans, and it’s also more dangerous (to humans). But you didn’t need the article for that, any simple research online would have given you that answer.
Ironic that you’re complaining about me arguing in bad faith when you can’t answer of any of the very specific questions I asked, and keep hand waving them away with broad generalizations.
Almost certainly they were anesthetised the whole time.
I would genuinely like to understand what the cost/benefit analysis was, what alternatives methods of research were considered, and why they weren’t viable.
In some jurisdictions, I think that’s published. Not sure about Ontario.
People want to be contrarian and support animal abuse just because it’s Doug Ford.
Cats and dogs, not all animals. Because it’s performative.
as he called the practice “cruel.”
Cool. Then we can agree that fishing, animal-based agriculture, hunting, fur farms, and puppy mills should be banned, too? Right, Doug?
It’s all or nothing. Might as not do anything according to that logic…
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Ontario has both a spring and fall bear hunt.
https://www.ontario.ca/document/ontario-hunting-regulations-summary/black-bear
I was wrong and I’m sorry
In regard to some avenues of research that’s too bad. Cats are a point of study for weight gain and loss since they appear to have issues similar to us. Some cats gain and hold weight faster than their mates with similar amounts of food. Some cats compulsively overeat while their mates do not. And so on.
We do test some things on humans for human diseases, and we have strict guidelines on proving safety / efficacy before human tests are approved + how those human tests are conducted. It might be helpful for everyone (humans / animals) to adopt some of those guidelines to animal studies.
Since yes, as you said, studying why cats suffer health issues can improve the lives of lots of animals. The key is doing the studies compassionately
There are regulations, but they’re not the same. I think it’s not really appropriate to compare animal testing to human testing for the primary reason that humans have the ability to provide consent.
For animal testing, I really don’t like the current idea being proposed here of basing this on how we feel about cats and dogs vs. mice and other animals. Some other metric like brain size or something about consciousness maybe, but that’s very hard to determine as well.
While I personally think there’s enough benefit to society to do some animal testing, I think a law that said no animal testing would be more ethically consistent than banning only cats and dogs.
The real thing that should be addressed here is better regulation, not arbitrary bans.
It was recently announced that a new study using cats showed they developed dementia the same way humans do.
Yeah not to mention animal testing isn’t just for human medical advancements… a lot of animal testing is to develop treatments for animal diseases, test new diet ingredients (after which the animals are adopted out), etc…
Sadly most aren’t adopted out as their systems/organs are wrecked so they get euthenized
Now do rabbits, mice, bats, primates and everything with a brain actually.
Most people only view cats and dogs of having any value worth protecting, which is terrible.
Oh, by the way, Doug’s government also wants to make it illegal for people to know about the cruelty on factory farms.
Wouldn’t that include the eventual patients as well, for new treatments?
Like, there’s strong questions about specism here, but somebody is going to have to go first.
I believe that they were testing on dogs because they were developing medicine for dogs…
So all testing will be done on humans. Got it. (No animal testing means no testing, meaning the first application are humans, and thus you are the testers. Yay!)
Pick a lane, Doug.
No, you misunderstand. Mice, rabbits or monkeys are still fair game.
