Culture & Ethics
Medicine
Animal Rights Opposes Successful Cancer Test
Dogs are amazing animals, intelligently designed by exceptional humans to serve us in many ways. In the course of that history, they have become our best friends, giving and receiving so much love and joy.
Dogs can detect cancer, and now one study shows an astonishing 90 percent success rate in sniffing out prostate cancer. From the story in The Guardian:
Hopes that man’s best friend can help medics detect prostate cancer have been boosted by research suggesting that trained German shepherd dogs can sniff out the chemicals linked to the disease from urine samples with remarkable accuracy.
The reliability rate reported by an Italy-based team in the Journal of Urology comes from the latest of several studies stretching back decades and raises the prospect of canines’ sense of smell helping doctors identify a number of human cancers and infectious diseases.
The two female dogs sniffed urine samples from 900 men, 360 with prostate cancer and 540 without. Both animals were right in well over 90 percent of cases.
Excellent. But animal-rights ideology opposes all animal domestication and insists we should not own any animals or treat them as property. Indeed, they equate owned animals with “slaves.”
That opposition to humans owning animals extends to dogs, although they keep that mum for fundraising reasons.
For example, animal rights leader Gary Francione, leader of the “abolitionist movement,” believes dogs should not exist. That is, even though he takes in injured un-adoptable dogs. I interviewed him for my book, A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy:
Gary Francione is a principled radical who believes unequivocally in ending all animal domestication. He told me, “We have a moral obligation to care for the domesticated nonhumans that we have brought into existence but we should not produce more.” He also acts on his beliefs, telling me, “We [Francione and his wife] share our home with four dogs. We had seven, but three died in the past year or so. We take only those dogs who will otherwise be killed because they are considered as ‘not adoptable.’ We consider them to be refugees in a world in which they really do not belong.”
In a world devised by advocates of animal rights, there would eventually by no meat-eating by humans, no leather shoes, no sushi, fishing fleets, pets, or indeed, dogs that sniff out cancer.
Animal rights, no. Animal welfare, yes.
Image by Albert galiza (Own work) [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.