Physicians Committee Delivers 100,000 Petitions Urging New Wayne State President to Halt Cruel, “Dead-End” Dog Experiments

DETROIT—With Wayne State University’s new president fresh on the job just this week, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and members of the community mobilized for an on-campus demonstration. Seeking an end to the institution’s use of live dogs in painful, deadly heart failure and hypertension experiments conducted since 1991, demonstrators held an 8-foot-long banner featuring a sad-looking, caged dog and dozens of signs that directly address President Kimberly Andrews Espy. The signs read “President Espy: End the Dead-End Dog Experiments” and “Patients Deserve Human-Relevant Research.” During the event, representatives from the Physicians Committee hand-delivered petitions from 104,243 people across Michigan and the country who are asking that the experiments stop and that Wayne State instead focus on productive research.

Recently, pressure has mounted on Wayne State to end the experiments. In June, Rep. Matt Koleszar introduced House Bill 4849, which would outlaw painful experiments on dogs and cats, like those conducted at the university. After learning details of the experiments, Michigan’s attorney general issued a formal opinion in 2022, seeking greater state oversight of animal research.

“President Espy has inherited this unfortunate stain on Wayne State’s reputation, but we hope she will make ending these dead-end experiments one of her first priorities,” said Ryan Merkley, director of research advocacy for the Physicians Committee. “Heart disease is a leading cause of death in Michigan and across the United States—it is truly shameful that Wayne State continues to torture and kill man’s best friend while wasting taxpayers’ money.”

According to thousands of pages of public records, Wayne State staff surgically open the chest cavities and sides of healthy dogs, implant medical devices and catheters in and around major arteries, and “tunnel” cables and wires under the animals’ skin and out through incisions between their shoulder blades. Many dogs die soon after the surgeries due to internal bleeding caused by implanted devices. Every dog who survives the initial surgeries will die during the experiment, in which a device triggers the animals’ hearts to beat at two to three times the normal rate while they run on treadmills. This is by design—Wayne State experimenters use each dog until his or her body gives out or a device breaks or malfunctions.

Even after a group of 11 state lawmakers wrote to previous Wayne State president M. Roy Wilson in 2021, the university has failed to provide any evidence that the experiments have benefited patients, continually referencing their “potential.” Since 1991, the lead experimenter at Wayne State has received $17 million in public funds for the experiments and related projects. And the research has been criticized by experts, including Dr. Michael Joyner of the Mayo Clinic, who conducts heart failure studies with human patients. In addition, population studies like the Framingham Heart Study, cell-based methods, and the use of diseased hearts from patients undergoing transplants are producing useful information. The Texas Heart Institute, which is dedicated solely to addressing cardiovascular disease, stopped using dogs in studies in 2015

To interview Ryan Merkley or to see the letter to President Espy, please contact Reina Pohl at 202-527-7326 or rpohl [at] pcrm.org (rpohl[at]pcrm[dot]org).