Suddenly remembered Tiger
A post yesterday condemning the use of animals in medical research prompted my memory of a cat named Tiger. Anyone who has had coronary by-pass surgery, or who credits the life of a loved one to coronary by-pass surgery owes Tiger a lot of gratitude. I'm not a medical person and I never researched this issue, but I do remember that before the advent of this surgery many people, men especially, frequently died from coronary disease in their fifties and sixties.
That changed dramatically with the invention of by-pass surgery. But did some doctor conceive of the idea of by-passing blocked arteries with human tissue or artificial material and just start trying it out on humans? No, that would hardly be practical for either patient or surgeon. Enter Tiger, the cat who had one of the first by-pass operations in the world. She came afterwards to live with us, then a young married couple, friends of a lab worker who had tended to Tiger and her fellow research subjects. She surprised us one morning by producing a kitten under our bed; our friend the lab tech swore she was never out of her cage at the same time as an other animal, but there it was. She went on to live a normal kitty life, the by-pass palpable in her abdomen. but not seeming to be any hindrance to her.
No Tiger never consented to be a research subject, and I'm sure many subjects die and probably did in the very surgical program Tiger was a part of. But I can only speak for myself and acknowledge that without animal subjects such as Tiger, many, many more humans would die.
(I would have posted this in the original thread but I was previously banned from that group for making the truthful, but apparently blasphemous statement that the Dalai Lama is not a vegetarian.)