U.S. Veteran Affairs tightens rules on experiments on dogs

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This article was published 10/10/2017 (3232 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SAN DIEGO — Americans love their dogs, but many U.S. military veterans have an extra bond after serving with canine units on the battlefield and increasingly depending on service dogs back at home.

A Veterans Affairs (VA) investigation found problems at a Richmond, Va., program where researchers do heart surgery on dogs to study the development of cardiac abnormalities.

Techniques include inserting pacemakers and catheters into the hearts of dogs, destroying heart tissue and creating heart attacks by injecting liquid latex into an artery. At the end, dogs are killed and their tissues studied.

One of the reasons that dogs are considered good for these experiments is they are easy to train to run on a treadmill while their hearts are monitored.

As a result of botched procedures, one lead researcher was removed from the studies this spring and the VA tightened its research protocols at Richmond’s Hunter Holmes McGuire VA Medical Center, one of at least three sites nationwide where the VA does invasive medical research on dogs.

Changes include additional reviews by the VA’s chief veterinarian of proposed dog research, more stringent scientific scrutiny of VA funding requests involving dogs and increased frequency of site visits for VA programs that have canines, a VA official told the San Diego Union-Tribune.

These moves come atop questioning of research at the Los Angeles VA on narcoleptic Doberman pinschers. The approved protocol called for dosing dogs with antidepressants or methamphetamine, then killing them and studying how the drugs affect their brains.

Now, at the highest levels, the VA is battling to save its canine research programs, which have come under assault in Congress.

“Part of our mission is to push the envelope constantly in search of medical advancements that will help improve the lives of disabled veterans,” VA Secretary David Shulkin wrote in an opinion piece last month in USA Today.

“If this legislation passes… it would stop potential VA canine research-related medical advancements that offer seriously disabled veterans the hope of a better future,” wrote Shulkin, a practising physician.

A spending bill that unanimously passed the House of Representatives in July would ban funding for two categories of invasive dog experimentation at the VA in the coming fiscal year.

Separately, the “PUPPERS Act” (Preventing Unkind and Painful Procedures and Experiments on Respected Species) would permanently ban money for invasive dog research by the VA.

Rep. Dave Brat, the Virginia Republican who sponsored the act, called the experiments in Richmond “horrific and inhumane” in a statement.

“These dog testing experiments at the VA are consuming limited taxpayer dollars, medical staff time and office space that could be better utilized to deliver health care for veterans,” Brat said.

But the VA has rallied an important chunk of the veterans community to its defense.

The American Legion, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and Vietnam Veterans of America have written letters to Congress in support of the VA’s canine research.

“There are many pet owners and animal lovers in the American Legion,” the legion’s statement said. “Sometimes animal research is needed for the greater good of protecting human life.”

The executive director of Paralyzed Veterans of America said he’d like to see Congress strike a balance on the issue.

“On one hand, understand and acknowledge the tremendous gains in medicine and treatment,” said Sherman Gillums Jr., in response to a query from the Union-Tribune. “On the other hand, if it is warranted, Congress should call for greater accountability and transparency to confront waste and deviation from humane protocols in scientific research funded by taxpayers.”

Dogs accounted for less than 0.05 percent of animals used in VA research in 2016, an official said. Almost all are mice or rats.

Not all veterans agree with the nation’s most established organizations.

“I’m not going to say canine research should or shouldn’t be done at all, I just don’t think the VA should do it,” said Ben Krause, creator of the contrarian website Disabledveterans.org. “VA has a hard enough time not withholding health care from veterans on a regular basis.”

A major player in this conflict is White Coat Waste Project, a four-year-old Washington, D.C., non-profit group whose philosophy is a marriage of fiscal conservatism and animal protection sentiment. The group offers $1,000 rewards to whistleblowers with evidence of animal abuse or wasteful spending at VA dog labs.

Founded by a Republican strategist, the group argues that taxpayers are spending more than US$15 billion a year on wasteful dog, cat, monkey and other animal experiments that are irrelevant, slow and expensive.

It was White Coat Waste’s complaint in March that spurred the VA’s investigation of the Richmond facility. The group filed Freedom of Information Act requests for records from the McGuire VA.

“We had known that the VA was one of the few agencies conducting painful experiments on dogs. And through our research into the details of those projects, we uncovered these series of violations at Richmond,” said Justin Goodman, White Coat Waste’s vice president.

According to Goodman, the VA has 79 sites that do animal experiments, but only three are doing “significantly painful” research on dogs.

Aside from Richmond, the others are Stokes Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Cleveland and Zablocki Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Milwaukee.

In Milwaukee, according to the watchdog group, the VA is using 150 dogs, including beagle puppies, for lung research that includes collapsing the dogs’ lungs and dissecting their necks and heads.

“The use of dogs has been decreasing in the United States,” Goodman said last week.

“Most people would probably be alarmed that, in 2017, there are still 60,000 dogs being used in experiments. I think that for many people, even one dog being used in an experiment that they are forced to pay for is too many,” he said, adding that research outside of federal agencies is often funded by government grants.

— San Diego Union-Tribune