EXCLUSIVE: Puppies secretly tested and killed at Ontario hospital for human heart research

Ottawa Citizen

a day ago

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London, Ont. — Surrounded by security staff, an unmarked white van pulls up to a receiving door behind St. Joseph's Hospital. Scrub-clad staff quickly remove large boxes covered with blankets from the van and slide them into the building.
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Hidden beneath those blankets are puppies in cages headed for the hospital's sixth-floor research lab, according to two staffers.
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Their way out will most likely be in garbage bags.
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Researchers inside the hospital's Lawson Research Institute, studying heart attack recovery in humans, use the dogs as stand ins. They induce up to three-hour-long heart attacks in the animals before killing them and removing their hearts, according to internal photos, documents and two current staff members who work there.
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It is a clandestine process that has successfully kept the hospital's long-standing dog research program hidden from the public and patients.
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The publicly funded research has been reviewed and approved. The hospital says the dogs are treated ethically in the service of medical advancement that benefits the public.
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But some experts interviewed by the Investigative Journalism Bureau (IJB) say the use of dogs in these experiments is both unnecessary and unethical. And the two whistleblowers call their work deeply troubling.
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Under strict orders of confidentiality, staff bring the puppies — as young as 10 months and as old as two years when they arrive from U.S. breeders — into the hospital. According to one whistleblower, they play loud music to drown out the barking.
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'We turn the radio on as loud as we can when we're in there,' says the staffer who spoke with the IJB on condition of anonymity. 'We're not even allowed to throw animal food bags into the regular garbage. We conceal them in other bags so no one knows we have animal food.'
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Videos obtained by the IJB filmed at St. Joseph's in April show three security guards surrounding a white van that pulls up to a hospital side door. Three people in scrubs wheel carts with blanket-covered boxes the size of dog crates from the van into the hospital. After bringing in the first cart, a person runs back to the van before wheeling in a second blanket-covered cart.