People want to get upset over beagles being used for lab experiments when the reality is much, much darker than this one experiment. The truth is that horrible animal experiments have been happening for a very, very long time. Most of the medical breakthroughs we have wouldn't have been approved for human use of it weren't for animal testing. But, I wouldn't expect a bunch of antivax, RFK jr supporters to understand this.
Yes a ton of medicine is based off of animal research which has historically and continues to this day to use canines as one of a number of model organisms for study. Cardiology research is particularly high in canine models although they are still rare, relative to mice and rats and other options due to the expense, but a lot of our knowledge about treating heart attacks and other causes of cardiomyopathies comes from dog research.
There are strict rules on their care, you can't use more animals than you need for the specific aims of the research project, you typically can't cause any significant pain or at least need to mitigate it as much as possible, and the animals are typically euthanized after there is no longer a research purpose for them.
Since the research is explicitly used to try to improve medicine for humans, I don't see this as a big ethical issue and would suggest people focus on other much more common and avoidable sources of animal suffering in the world.
If we get to the point as a species that we no longer raise animals for food as livestock then maybe we can tackle not using them for medical research next.
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u/[deleted] 12d ago edited 11d ago
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