Battle Lines Form on Animal Research : UCSD Contract With County Pound Becomes Rallying Cry

On the battlefield of animal research, vocabulary is a versatile weapon. Researchers use terms like animal “discomfort.” They talk of “post-operative analgesia” and “sacrificing” of animal subjects. They stress advances in biomedical research that “enhance and extend” life. They talk of “patients’ rights.”

Their adversaries prefer terms like “pain and suffering” and “psychological trauma.” They speak of “sentient creatures” and exploitation of “non-human animals.” They emphasize “animal rights”--including the right to a “painless and dignified death.”

This week, both sides will marshal their artillery for the latest round in California’s war over animal research--an attempt by animal-welfare groups in San Diego County to shut off a principal supply of dogs and cats for biomedical research at UC San Diego.

Practice Called Inhumane

The battleground will be the County Administration Center. There, a little-known county advisory committee will hold a hearing Wednesday on whether the county should continue its practice of selling unclaimed animals from county-run shelters to UCSD.

Animal-protection groups say that the practice is cruel. They say that lost and abandoned pets, accustomed to human kindness, should not be used in laboratory research. They say that the county shelter is shirking its legal obligation to provide humane treatment.

UCSD researchers counter that pound animals have played a critical role in much of the most significant research done on the campus. They say that the animals were crucial in the development of dramatically improved methods of addressing many heart and lung disorders.

They say that the animals do not suffer: Most are placed under anesthesia, used briefly, then killed by drug overdose without regaining consciousness. There is no alternative to animal research, researchers say, and no “cost-effective” substitute for pound animals.

“The bottom line is people have rights too,” argues Stuart Zola-Morgan, chairman of the UCSD committee that oversees animal research, and a researcher in the area of memory and amnesia who studies monkeys’ behavior after removing portions of the brain.

“We can talk about this all day, but the bottom line is do we give up our own rights to long and healthy lives for the rights of animals that are abandoned and unwanted and scheduled to die in the pound?” Zola-Morgan asked.

Each side accuses the other of distorting the issues.

University officials say that the real issue is all animal research--a practice that they say their critics would like to abolish. They accuse the animal-welfare activists of using the narrower issue of pound animals to get a foot in the door of animal research.

Activists hotly deny that charge (though some acknowledge that they do oppose all animal research). They say that the issue at hand is “pound seizure,” pure and simple. They accuse the university of resorting to a red herring.

“This is a bogus argument to try and focus the issue on animal research,” said Sally Mackler, a member of the San Diego chapter of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “The issue is very narrow here: the use of former pets as tools for research.”

Unidentified Animals Only

Under the current system, UCSD may buy dogs and cats that are impounded by the county’s Department of Animal Control. The department’s three shelters serve the unincorporated areas of the county and any cities that contract for animal control services.

Sally Hazzard, director of the department, said that only animals without collars or identification may be sold for research. (In rare cases, she said, an owner may turn over a pet and specifically offer the animal to medical research.)

Hazzard said that unidentified animals are held for three working days, then screened for suitability for adoption. If unsuitable, they are held another three days before being offered to UCSD if the university needs them.

Last year, 691 dogs and 129 cats went to UCSD, selling for $55 per dog and $25 per cat, plus tax. Hazzard said her department killed an additional 25,115 impounded and unclaimed animals, “euthanizing” them with a fatal drug overdose.

The issue is volatile--and not just in San Diego.

Last year, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors refused to order that county’s shelters to stop selling animals to medical research centers. Only seven of California’s 58 counties still allow the practice, animal control officials say.

So earlier this year, San Diego County animal-welfare groups formed a coalition of 14 groups ranging from the Fund for Animals to the San Diego Humane Society. Then they persuaded the county to schedule a public hearing on whether or not to continue the UCSD contract.

The hearing, set for Wednesday, will be held by the county’s animal control advisory committee, a group of appointees of the county supervisors. The committee will then make a recommendation to the supervisors on whether to continue the practice.

Animals Called Ill-Prepared

Among the critics’ arguments against what they call “pound seizure”:

- They say pets that are accustomed to human handling, kindness and free range in a household are ill-prepared for life in a cage in a lab. They say that it is cruel and immoral to subject an animal to such psychological trauma and stress.

- They suggest that UCSD uses pound animals largely because they are cheap--in spite of journal articles stating that pound animals are poor subjects for some research since little is known about their history or genetic backgrounds.

- They say that UCSD should find other animals if it needs them, such as animals that are “purpose-bred” for research. If those are more costly, they say, that might discourage replication of work and encourage a search for alternatives to animal research.

- Critics scoff at UCSD’S assurances that research is carefully scrutinized. They note that researchers are exempt from the state’s anti-cruelty laws, and that the general public is barred from the meetings of the university’s animal subjects committee.

- Finally, they say that the use of pound animals compromises the shelter system and erodes cooperation in animal control. If people fear that animals will be used in research, critics contend, they won’t turn strays over to the shelters and will incur new risks by holding them in their homes.

“The pound wants to be known as a ‘shelter,’ ” said Fred Lee, director of the San Diego Humane Society and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “Well, a shelter is not a place where you send animals for research.”

In response, the university counters the critics’ charges:

- University officials say that the animals do not suffer. They say that most are used almost immediately in “acute procedures”; that is, they are anesthetized, operated on and studied, then killed with the same kind of drug overdose used by the pound.

- UCSD questions whether it is accurate to call pound animals “pets,” noting that a flea collar is enough identification to exempt an animal from consideration for research. Zola-Morgan spoke of “several levels of surety that the animals used for research are not going to be somebody’s pet.”

- They say that purpose-bred animals would cost $200 to $600 each, and that there are no breeders in California. The use of purpose-bred animals also raises an ethical question, university officials say, in that both they and the pound animals would end up being killed.

- They say that pound animals are well suited to certain types of research because they mirror the “genetic diversity” of people. And while mice might be desirable in cancer research, dogs have contributed greatly to understanding of the human heart.

- As for alternatives to animal research, researchers say that there currently are none. Computer modeling and tissue and cell culturing are often inadequate. They say that certain procedures must be tested on animals before they can be tried on humans.

“It’s simply a question of whether an animal that’s going to be sacrificed can be used for the advancement of knowledge in a way that’s not really harmful to them,” said Richard Attiyeh, UCSD’s dean of graduate studies and research.

“In the last several decades, every major biomedical development for the cure and treatment of disease has involved the use of animals,” said Zola-Morgan. “Given that, one has to think about what would be the progress of biomedicine without the use of animals. It would be catastrophic. It would simply grind to a halt.”

Medical Advances Cited

University officials cite numerous examples of medical advances that they say were developed in part through pound dog research, including treatments for hereditary emphysema, veinous thrombosis and pulmonary embolism; a diagnostic tool for studying heart and lung arteries, and a system of laser lung surgery that allows removal of lung tumors without open chest surgery.

Dr. James Covell, a professor of medicine specializing in cardiac physiology who has worked with others on pioneering studies of heart disease at UCSD, said pound animals were used in work that “dramatically changed the way we treat heart attacks.”

Covell said that some of the studies in the early 1970s helped explain what factors determined whether heart muscle would survive after a heart attack. Testing hypotheses on pound dogs contributed to the development of techniques to minimize heart damage.

In such studies, Covell said, the investigators would anesthetize a dog, cut open its chest and create a heart attack by tying off a coronary vessel. Then they would measure the heart function and try out treatments to see whether they improved or reduced that function.

In more recent studies of heart muscle fibers, Covell said, researchers put tiny lead markers in the heart of an anesthetized dog and tracked their motion with high-speed X-ray.

“After making the measurements, then you would sacrifice the animal with an overdose of barbiturate, in the same way they’re sacrificed at the pound,” Covell said.

Dr. David Sahn, chief of the division of pediatric cardiology, said that pound dogs made a similar contribution to the development of ultrasound, a system of sending sound waves into the heart that has proven to be a safer, shorter way of diagnosing heart problems.

“As far as I’m concerned, pound dogs are rejects of society, and what the pound does is put them to sleep,” said Sahn. “We feed them, condition them, care for them and put them to sleep. While they’re asleep, we use them to find out something about helping people.”

Research Called Wasteful

Critics, however, are not convinced.

Cris Waller, a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said that documents received through Freedom of Information Act requests from the National Institutes of Health have convinced her that much of the animal research at UCSD is wasteful and duplicative.

Waller suggested that animals are wasted because researchers are eager to garner prestige by fattening their bibliographies--what she called “publishing papers in the Journal of Canadian Fish Disease for the rest of your life.”

Said activist Mackler of one study that she said cited 12 others with similar results: “It was fact-finding for fact-finding alone, with no real reason to believe that it was going to lead to any sort of improvement in human health and welfare or medical progress.”

Waller and Mackler’s organization, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, has been active on other issues, including the treatment of animals in agriculture, entertainment and cosmetics testing, and the proliferation of domestic animals.

Both women said that they oppose all animal research. But Waller said that she did not want her views to be used to shift the debate on pound animals. “If it’s a bad practice, it should be stopped,” she said. “My position on animal research has nothing to do with that.”

Lee, the Humane Society chief, said he suspected that “animal research has to be done.”

“It would be ideal if we didn’t have to use animals, but I’m not sure that’s possible at this time,” Lee said.

A more unequivocal critique came from Nedim Buyukmihci, a professor of veterinary ophthalmology at UC Davis and a co-founder for the Assn. of Veterinarians for Animal Rights who has written to the San Diego County animal control advisory committee.

“We try not to treat other animals as being property of humans and therefore subservient to human interests,” Buyukmihci said of his group in an interview. “We try to accord those animals individual rights. We believe all animals have inherent value.”

Buyukmihci said that he has stopped using animals in research, and neither eats nor wears animal products. He said that he tries to live in such a way as to “make my impact minimal” on other animals.

He disputed the assessment that biomedical research would come to a halt if the use of pound animals, or all animals, were halted. “I can say that I believe strongly that biomedical research would not be crippled,” Buyukmihci said. “Its focus and direction would change.

“But that’s not the major issue,” Buyukmihci added. “The major issue is, fundamentally is it morally correct to take another creature, who is essentially similar to you in all the morally relevant ways, and kill that individual with the idea of bringing about benefit to yourself?”