As a Hound, How Could I Ignore?

It’s not always easy to get a hard copy of the New York Times on a holiday like New Year’s Day. They tend to do a smaller print run than usual. But this year, on our way to a party in Fort Greene, I snagged a copy of the paper that I read when we got home. Being a Tuesday, there was a Science Time section. And I was disturbed to read an article about dog-killing in my hometown (link above).

It seems that the medical school at Case Western Reserve University, my almost alma mater (I dropped out of law school after one grueling year), where my parents and two great uncles went to school, they kill dogs. They are the last medical school in the country that uses a dog with its exposed beating heart to teach cardiology. When they’re done with the dogs, they “dispose” of them.

I don’t believe in the absolute ban of animal testing- there will be drugs or procedures that can only be tested on animals. I don’t believe in killing rabbits for mascara, either. But the realization that the teaching hospital where I was born, where in the 1990s I knew the dean of students at the med school has been and continues to kill dogs (at least until the end of the month) bothers me. Cutting up a dog is not like dissecting a frog or a fetal pig in high school biology, or eating a steak. It’s a dog.