Activists demand end to inhumane dog experiments at Wayne State

Animal rights activists called on Wayne State University’s new president on Wednesday to end decades of what they describe as inhumane experiments in which dogs are forced to undergo painful, invasive surgeries intended to cause heart failure.

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) collected 104,243 signatures for a petition demanding “an end to the cruel, unproductive dog experiments.”

After a rally on campus, activists lugged 16 boxes of the signatures to President Kimberly Andrews Espy’s office.

“I hope you can make good use of these,” Ryan Merkley, director of research advocacy for PCRM, told a receptionist.

Over the past decade, activists have been urging Wayne State to end the experiments, saying the research is killing dogs and not yielding enough significant findings to be considered useful. The university has been conducing the experiments on dogs since 1991, Merkley says.

“They artificially create heart failure in dogs,” Merkley tells Metro Times. “Over the course of two to four surgeries, they place numerous devices in and around the heart, around major arteries, and those devices, put next to delicate blood vessels, often cause internal bleeding. We have 15,000 pages of public records showing numerous dogs dying from those devices nicking an aorta, and the dog's chest cavity fills with blood. They find dogs dead in their cages from these experiments. They’re cruel, and the topper is that they aren’t yielding any useful results.”

In a written statement, Wayne State defended the research, saying it has the support of the National Institutes of Health and holds the potential to create “new strategies for the treatment of congestive heart failure and hypertension.”

“Heart disease is the number one killer in America, so the odds are the research is going to benefit your health or the lives of your love ones,” the university said.

Wayne State added that it “is committed to the responsible and ethical use of animals in research, but also recognizes the benefits of research involving animals.”

Over the past decade, the university’s then-president, M. Roy Wilson, declined to discuss the research with animal rights activists, Merkley says. With a new president in place, Merkley hopes that the door to productive dialogue will open.

“Despite 10 years of pleading with Wayne State to end these experiments and give us some evidence that they’re helping people, they can’t say anything other than they have potential,” Merkley says. "We’re hopeful that with a new administration she’ll at least take our calls and take our meeting requests and do the right thing.”

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine say there are many effective and humane alternatives to animal experiments, including a functioning human heart model created by researchers at Michigan State University. Scientists may also use hearts donated for research and diseased hearts from patients undergoing transplants. In 2015, the Texas Heart Institute ended its experiments on dogs for research on cardiovascular disease.

In August 2021, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine installed four billboards in Detroit, three within blocks of Wayne State, that featured dogs who recently died as a result of the experiments.

Mike Dinsmore, a retired engineering director, said he joined protesters Wednesday because the experiments are cruel and inhumane.

“The animals suffer quite a bit, and of course they don’t understand what’s going on,” Dinsmore tells Metro Times. “If this research were done on humans, it would be done on a voluntary basis. But animals have no choice.”

Protesters are calling on Wayne State’s new president to end cruel experiments on dogs. The research has been ongoing for more than 3 decades and has not produced any meaningful findings. pic.twitter.com/spkuVL4Gto

— Steve Neavling (@MCmuckraker) August 2, 2023

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