100 Dogs Who Changed Civilization Read Free

sense of smell, accomplish something so difficult? But in 1989, the British medical journal
The Lancet
printed an anecdotal report about a British mutt who developed an obsessive interest in a mole on her owner’s thigh. The dog’s unnerved master had the blemish checked out and discovered it was a malignant melanoma—a melanoma that would have eventually killed her, had it not been found.
    That account, along with a handful of similar stories, piqued the interest of American dermatologist and skin cancer specialist Dr. Armand Cognetta of Tallahassee, Florida. Realizing that many melanoma cases go unreported until it’s too late to save the patient, he wondered if dogs could be trained to sniff out the disease in its beginningstages. But how does one train a cancer dog? Unsure of how to proceed, he contacted Duane Pickel, the former head of the Tallahassee Police canine corps, and asked if he knew of a four-legged candidate who was up for such a challenge. Pickel nominated his own pet, a standard schnauzer named George.
    George was already a highly skilled bomb-sniffing dog. However, his new assignment required even more rigorous preparation. First, he was taught to sniff out concealed test tubes containing tiny bits of malignant melanomas. Then a sample was bandaged to a volunteer, along with numerous other bandages concealing nothing. During dozens of trials, George accumulated a 97 percent detection rate. Finally, he was unleashed on a handful of actual skin cancer patients. The schnauzer managed to “diagnose” six out of seven.
    The idea of a dog “sniffing out” cancer really isn’t that much of a stretch. They’re certainly equipped for it. Canines possess more than 200 million smell-sensing cells in their noses (compared to a human’s relatively paltry 5 million), and they’ve proven themselves capable of locating other extremely challenging targets, from a small cache of illicit drugs in the huge hold of a ship to a single pheasant in a vast field. And since the human track record of finding melanomas in their earliest phases is abysmal, any help dogs can offer would be providential—not to mention much cheaper and easierto do than almost any conventional medical test.
    George, who showed the possibilities of such a technique, passed away in 2002 from a brain tumor. But the work continues. Several new studies have been conducted, including a British attempt to teach dogs to detect bladder cancer by smelling patients’ urine. Amazingly, one of the supposedly healthy people who was used as part of the experiment’s “control” group was found to have a very early case of bladder cancer when the dogs reacted strongly to his supposedly normal pee. Thanks to their sensitive noses, he was treated and recovered. He became one of the first—but not the last—cancer patients to owe his health to a dog.

THE
BROWN DOG
THE UNKNOWN MUTT WHOSE
DEATH FURTHERED THE CAUSE
OF ANIMAL RIGHTS

    Not all dogs who contribute to the advancement of the human race do so voluntarily. Hundreds of thousands of canines have died in laboratories, subjected to everything from dangerous experiments to vivisections. For a long time, no one thought much about it—until the lonely death of a single nameless stray triggered a public outcry.
    In February 1903, the dog in question—a small terrier known to history as the Brown Dog—was killed after being subjected to vivisection at the Department of Physiology at University College London. Sadly, there was nothing unusual about the macabre affair. It happened regularly for the edification of the students. But this case was different. Two of the witnesses that day were Leisa Schartau and Louise Lind-af-Hageby, Swedish antivivisectionists who had enrolled at the London School of Medicine for Women specifically to witness and record such procedures. They presented their notes to Stephen Coleridge, the honorary secretary of