Dogs are amazing animals, intelligently designed by exceptional humans to serve us in so many ways. And in the course of that history, they became our best friends, giving and receiving so much love and joy.
Dogs can detect cancer, and now one study shows an astonishing 90% success rate in sniffing out prostate cancer. From The Guardian story:
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% of cases.
Excellent. But animal rights ideology opposes all animal domestication and believe we should not own any animal or treat them as property. Indeed, they equate owned animals to “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. This, even though he takes in injured un-adoptable dogs. He told me in an interview 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 of animal right’s devising, 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.