Earlier this week, it was reported that Rick Slayman, the first person to ever receive a transplanted pig kidney, sadly passed away less than two months after the procedure. While the hospital, Massachusetts General, has stated that there’s no evidence that the patient’s death was a direct result of the transplant, it’s clear that the surgery did not succeed in substantially extending Slayman’s life.
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Pigs are intelligent and sensitive animals, with cognitive abilities that outrank dogs and, in fact, compare to those of a 3-year-old human child. Pigs have demonstrated the capability for spatial learning and memory, problem-solving, and the use of tools. They’re highly emotionally intelligent, displaying a preference for familiar humans and have even demonstrated what’s called “emotional contagion,” wherein one animal mirrors the emotions of another—an indicator of empathy. It’s little wonder that pigs are often kept as pets, and like dogs and cats, they have their own distinct personalities. It would be a major ethical misstep if our society were to create a system that calls for the torture and slaughter of even more pigs than the 3.8 million already killed daily by the factory-farming meat industry.
I have nothing but sympathy for Slayman and his family, and if I or a loved one were sick, I’d also do everything in my power to extend my life or theirs. But the medical establishment isn’t doing any of us a favor by continuing to waste time and money on animal testing that may or may not have any practical applications for human health.
It bears reminding that mice, dogs, and monkeys aren’t miniature people, which is why conducting experiments on them to better understand the human body is worse than useless. We have lots of analogous parts—hearts that pump blood, lungs that oxygenate the blood, stomachs that break down food—but they’re still different species entirely. Chocolate is lethal to dogs; to humans, not so much. Scientists have cured cancer in mice, but we’ve yet to see the science applied successfully to human patients. Furthermore, there are unique risks of xenotransplantation, like the cross-species transfer of diseases (which may in fact have been a contributing or causal factor in the death of one pig-heart recipient).
We’ve already seen the effects of various zoonotic diseases, and it seems patently unwise to open up a whole new avenue for diseases to transfer between species. Animal testing in medicine is no longer required by the FDA, in part due to the fact that so many animal trials resulted in little useful—and sometimes misleading—information about how a drug will affect humans.
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