Abstract
THE Dogs' Protection Bill for the second reading of which 122 members of Parliament were induced to vote the other day is one of those measures which are born of ignorance and fostered on misrepresentation. All our knowledge of the functions of the body is fundamentally based on experiments which have been made upon dogs. The action of the heart and its nerves; the mechanisms of circulation, respiration, digestion, and secretion; the functions of the liver, pancreas, and kidney; the processes of metabolism, the causation of diabetes; the utility of the internally-secreting1 glands; the manner in which the organs of the body are governed and their functions regulated—none of these could have been elucidated nor could the knowledge which has been obtained have been applied to man from experiments upon animals other than dogs. The prohibition of the employment of dogs for these investigations would put a complete stop to the progress of physiology in Great Britain—which, in this particular science, has, from the time of Harvey onwards, always held a peculiarly honourable position. It would put medicine in this country at an enormous disadvantage as compared with other countries; and our professors and students would have to go abroad to gain that practical knowledge of the functions of the body for the investigation of which the dog is the only animal available. For medicine is founded upon an exact knowledge of these functions without it the physician gropes in the dark and works by guesses which are generally far removed from the actual truth. Moreover many diseases which are common to man and animals can only be fully investigated in an animal like the dog, unless man himself is to be made the subject of experiment. And it is scarcely necessary to point out even to our opponents that the prohibition they demand would prevent any further investigation of the causation and treatment of diseases which are peculiar to the dog, so that the race they are professing to protect would ultimately suffer from such prohibition even more than mankind.
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SCH,FER, E. The Prohibition of Experiments on Dogs . Nature 93, 242–244 (1914). https://doi.org/10.1038/093242b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/093242b0