"Where's Pepper?"

[Pandacinny]

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Has anyone else seen this story on Slate.com?

http://www.slate.com/id/2219224/

It's about a dog that was stolen from her family's farm in 1965 and transported to a hospital where she was used as a subject for medical research. The story is coming out in five parts and only two are out so far. There are fairly active comments going on Twitter and Facebook.

There are still a few more parts to go on this, so I guess it's a little early to pass judgment. Personally, I hope the author includes more information on the state of research today - especially in regards to animal procurement (evil scientists are NOT out to steal your pet) and on the regulations put in place to protect the animals used in research.

What do you guys think?

 

[bunnity]

I read the first part, and I'm curious to see if it gets animal-rights-y; I'm also curious about if / how they're going to tie in the Pavlov thing.

I actually found the comments / discussion more interesting than the actual article. I think it is really interesting to see how regular (non vet related) people react to these issues, and probably useful to us future vets to get a handle on how much our potential clients might know and what they might think. I only read the ones on the Slate forum but I felt the response was pretty reasonable - people talking about how research made them sad but they realize why it is necessary for medicine. Honestly I expected more of a "research is evil" versus "animals suck" debate so I'm interested to see how it goes.

 

[jglovicz]

I heard about this story a few years ago in our animal welfare class. I think it's important to see where we were to understand why we got where we are (if that makes any sense at all). That said, I hope that the current laws about animal use in research are made crystal clear. I'm afraid there's no way to stop some PETA member/animal rights person from saying how awful all researchers are!

 

[StillDreaming]

that's interesting... It'll be just as so to see where it's going. I hope you are all right and this doesn't turn into an animal rightsy kind of artciel and that people realize this happen 4 decades ago and research is much more under control now with great rights for the animals used...

 

[Pandacinny]

So it turns out the author is a former PhD candidate turned off by animal research. Now he's a journalist who apparently makes a living by writing inflammatory stories about animal research where he's sure to play up the juicy bits about past wrongs or gross misconduct, but leaves out all the stuff about vet care and enrichment and dedicated caretakers. 🙄

As you might be able to tell, I'm not too happy with how this article turned out.

 

[bunnity]

Yeah I'm disappointed too. I also was annoyed that he got all sensationalist about surgery - I could just as easily write a graphic description of how someone would die without a pacemaker. I do post-op EKG's on people in the pacemaker/ICD cath lab and they do at least 3-4 cases a day. When I think of the hundreds of people I've seen over the years come out of the lab with a second shot at life, it's really frustrating that people like them weren't featured in this story. And like Pandacinny said, it really didn't give a modern description of the things that are done to make the animals' lives better.

 

[IHeartGoldens]

Interesting article althought I haven't gotten through the whole thing yet. Yes, stealing dogs (and actions as such) are unethicial, wrong and should be prosecuted. No need to elaborate as I should think we all agree.

This article seems to use Pepper's story just to further the author's own ideas (animal rights etc), using it to gain emotions from a sympathic audience and then play up stories about big and bad researchers. Once I finish the article, I'll post more.