Dog March at UCSF Needs You

To sign up, please email noanimalexperiment [at] yahoo.com

Despite last year's "Day of the Dog" protest and many civilized attempts to dialogue with UCSF's officials, UCSF is still determined to perform cruel heart experiments on 750 to 800 dogs. They will implant pacemakers to make their hearts beat extremely fast, and they will tear up a portion of their hearts. Essentially, they will cause artificial heart failure from which to gather artificial data to publish. The dogs will suffer in great pain for days to up to six months, depending on the degree of problems and injuries caused. UCSF has already acquired several dogs, now most likely already mutilated and suffering at this very moment.

Why are they doing this when people already know that a dog's heart is very different from a human heart anatomically and physiologically even down to the cellular level? The reason is greed for the grant money financed by taxpayers. The university keeps half of every grant awarded to the researchers. Also, they think the public will never find out.

To get the media's attention, we need to hold the biggest Dog March ever. (Only two dogs came to last year's "Day of the Dog".) Please spread the news this time as widely as possible and please ask everyone around you who has a well-behaved dog to come take a walk with us.

We need at least 50 well-behaved dogs to commit for a couple of hours. The date will be decided once this target is reached. It will have to be a weekday because the media generally doesn't come on weekends. If you work on weekdays, please see if you could take a day off. Anyone interested please email noanimalexperiment [at] yahoo.com

Thank you so much for your love of animals.

Sincerely,
Michelle Tsai



For those interested, below are more details on the two experiments by Dr. Olgin:

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(1st Experiment)

550 dogs to be used in the next 3 years

Title: Remodeling in Atrial Fibrillation

Claimed Purpose: “To develop new therapies that may prevent cardiac arrhythmias from leading to irreversible heart damage and chronic disease."

Procedures: 150 dogs would be surgically implanted with one pacemaker. Another 150 dogs would be implanted with two pacemakers. Yet another 150 dogs would be subjected to “mitral valve avulsion," a surgical procedure that tears a portion of the mitral valve of the dog's heart in order to cause “mitral regurgitation," or the blood to flow backwards. Another 100 dogs will be used as controls. The 450 dogs who undergo surgery are expected to survive 4 weeks to 6 months. However, “the only animals that would survive for up to 6 months are the RAP (rapid atrial pacing) dogs, and this is very rare." The dogs “will be monitored weekly, and daily if problems arise." Problems may be “infection in pacemaker pocket, signs of heart failure (i.e., ascites, lethargy), appearance of continued pain such as crying, flinching from touch, limping or in any way favoring incision area, or weight loss." Some dogs will be given “experimental drugs"; i.e., Ace inhibitor, PAI-1 inhibitor, TFG-B antagonist, and Pirfenidone. Thirty percent of the surgically impaired dogs are expected to die before the project ends. All 550 dogs, if they survive, will eventually undergo a terminal 8-hour-long electrophysiological study. While the dogs are under general anesthesia, their chests are cut open. “To support the heart, a pericardial cradle is made by suturing each corner of the cut pericardium to the skin. Recordings of the heart's internal blood pressure, EKG, PQRST intervals, and heart rates are taken for later analysis. Finally, the dogs will be euthanized and their hearts removed for optical mapping, cellular electrophysiology and histology analysis."

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(2nd Experiment)

200 dogs to be used

Title: Effects of Congestive Heart Failure on Electrophysiology and Remodeling

Claimed Purpose: “To understand the mechanism by which heart failure causes atrial fibrillation [arrhythmia]."

Procedures: Experimenters plan to implant pacemakers in 160 dogs. 40 dogs will be used as controls. Three to five days after surgery, the pacemakers will be programmed to rapidly pace at 200 to 250 beats per minute for 2-6 weeks and/or until the dogs show symptoms of heart failure. There is the potential for severe pain as "adverse effects" include "abdominal bloating from heart failure, pulmonary edema and coughing" and infection from the implantation of the pacemakers. The dogs will receive analgesics “on an as needed basis." Pain will be assessed by “whether the dog flinches when touched, cries out when touched or in any way favors the incision [from the surgery], or fails to eat and drink." It is planned for the dogs to live from 2-7 weeks after surgery. Five percent of dogs are expected to die due to heart failure during the course of the experiment. The dogs will undergo weekly EKG's “to assess the degree of heart failure and/or mitral regurgitation." All dogs, including those in the control group, will be euthanized in the end and their hearts cut out for “optical mapping, cellular electrophysiology and histology analysis" or autoradiography.