Human Nature: Science, Technology, and Life.

Dog Medicine and Dog Breeding

A couple of weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture tentatively approved a flu vaccine for dogs. The agency said the vaccine's purpose was "the control of disease associated with canine influenza virus infection, type A, subtype H3N8," which "has now been detected in dogs in 30 states." The vaccine was approved only after "the acceptance of data supporting product purity, safety and a reasonable expectation of efficacy."

At the time, I thought this was a nice expression of man's love for his best friend. We don't just develop medicines for ourselves; we also make them for animals under our care. And we don't just treat your dog like, well, a lab animal; we test the vaccine first to be sure it's safe.

Then I saw this follow-up from Donald McNeil Jr. in the New York Times:

Some veterinarians have found that the dogs that tend to die from [this flu] are the "brachycephalics"—dogs with short snub noses. Just as obesity has proved dangerous to human flu victims because of the weight on their chests, being bred to have a short, bent respiratory tract is dangerous for dogs. "It really puts a strain on their ability to breathe," Dr. Crawford said. "They can't move air in and out of their lungs."

This is the kind of thing that sickens me about dog breeding. This health defect we're so generously treating? We caused it. As I've noted before, dogs are a 15,000-year reckless genetic experiment. We've bred collies for vigilance, Rottweilers for aggression, and retrievers for obedience. We've given some dogs legs so short they couldn't run, and we've given others, such as the unlucky pooches now dying of H3N8 flu, noses so flat they couldn't breathe.

So congratulations to us. We're now trying to fix a problem we created. Will this teach us to stop breeding such defects into animals? Don't count on it. Some creatures are just slow to learn.

Dog Bites Manier

As the great houses of journalism contract and collapse, what's happening to our best science writers? Here's one answer: Jeremy Manier, formerly of the Chicago Tribune, has set up a "Science Life" blog at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

If you haven't followed Jeremy's work over the years, treat yourself to a few of his fine pieces. Here's his take on synthetic biology last year. Here's his look at empathy among chimps. And here's his wrenching story about a Christian professor's struggle to reconcile faith with evolution.

In Sunday's blog installment, Jeremy picks a small bone with yours truly. To be precise, a dog bone. Last week, I wrote about the breeding of preferred dog traits using the frozen sperm of a long-dead show poodle. I concluded: "I want to throw up."

One thing I should have learned about bioethics by now: Mention anything close to puking, and you'll remind people of Leon Kass, whose "Wisdom of Repugnance" essay has been reduced by progressives, unfairly, to shorthand for irrational conservatism. I can almost draw the chain of linked neurons for you: vomit, repugnance, Kass, George W. Bush, and back to vomit.

But my own chain of neurons has carried me away. Back to Jeremy. Here's his critique:

In this case repugnance seems more silly than wise. Dog breeders have been using frozen sperm since the 1960s. As bioethical dilemmas go, it's a Brave Old World. Saletan wants to use dog breeding as an analogy for designer babies, but it may be hopelessly flawed for that purpose because it's so familiar. Such comfortable examples are of little help in imagining how awful genetic trait selection in human babies would be.

Hmmm. Well, here's my answer, for what it's worth: I was using a familiar example because that's what we have. In projecting the future, the best we can do, empirically, is to look for a similar practice in the present or past. The existing practice will differ in some ways from what we're imagining. But the similarities may shed some light.

So here's my question to Jeremy: What current practices would be more helpful than dog breeding in projecting/imagining genetic trait selection in humans? Human trait selection is what interests both of us. As to whether canine breeding is the best way to illuminate that future—well, as the saying goes, I've got no dog in that fight.

But I do have some dogs in the fight for the blogosphere. As the old media dissolve or evolve into the new, I'm rooting for great writers like Rob Stein, John Tierney, Rick Weiss, and Carl Zimmer—from whatever perches they can find—to help weave an Internet conversation about science and technology that's as rich and engaging as the best of the Web's political commentary. Add to that list: Jeremy Manier.

Dog Lover Bites Man

I love animals. I really do. But there's such a thing as loving animals the wrong way.

No, I'm not talking about that, you perverts. Or that. I've said enough about that sort of behavior.

I'm talking about Leona Helmsley and her dog.

Two weeks ago, I flagged a Reuters story about Helmsley's will. She left $12 million to her dog, Trouble, and zero to her grandkids. A court eventually cut the dog's share to $2 million, sufficient to support its "maintenance and welfare at the highest standards of care for more than 10 years."

Crazy, huh? But it turns out that wasn't the half of it. In Wednesday's New York Times, Stephanie Strom reports that according to two sources, a "mission statement" for Helmsley's charitable trust dictates that "the entire trust, valued at $5 billion to $8 billion and amounting to virtually all her estate, be used for the care and welfare of dogs."

That sounds really sweet, until Strom explains how dogs ended up with the whole bundle:

The two people who described the statement said Mrs. Helmsley signed it in 2003 to establish goals for the multibillion-dollar trust that would disburse assets after her death. The first goal was to help indigent people, the second to provide for the care and welfare of dogs. A year later, they said, she deleted the first goal.

This is exactly what critics of animal rights keep telling us: The more we elevate animals, they warn, the less we'll respect humans. I don't think it has to be that way. I think we're all animals along a continuum of capacities, some of us more rational or moral than others. Part of the majesty of humanity is its ability to recognize and honor these capacities in other species, even when it's inconvenient to us. To do so is to elevate humanity, not degrade it.

Writing indigent human beings out of your legacy is no way to love animals. All it shows it that you don't recognize or love the animals who matter most.

The Price of Inventing the Dog

One thing I hope to do more of, now that I've got this network of Web pages, is to integrate reader comments into the blog. Here's a good thread in response to yesterday's post on dog meat. Lid writes,

I like pigs just fine but dogs share a place with people like no other animal.  Without dogs man could not have herded goats and sheep. Man would not have settled the Arctic before modern technology. Dogs are largely responsible for our ability to sucessfully hunt game and establish populations in arid climates. Without dogs civilization would have evolved much differently, its dispersion limited and its progress stunted.

To which Sevumar adds,

Very few people relish the idea of eating an animal they've developed a personal bond with. Because dogs are so common as pets in our culture, it's understandable that many would be squeamish about eating them. These attitudes are the result of the culture we've been born into or raised in and they vary widely from place to place. In Peru, it's common for residents of the highlands to eat guinea pigs. Many African and Asian cultures use a variety of insects in their cuisine. In many East Asian cultures, the keeping of dogs as pets is a relatively recent phenomenon, so eating them was not considered taboo. Nomads of steppe cultures regularly ate horse meat. Typically, cultures learned to make use of whatever sources of protein were available to them.

It's an interesting conversation. If you start with the logic of the first post -- that the dog's moral priority stems from its role in our history -- then the second post seems correct in pegging this as a kind of relativism. So if you come from a population that didn't rely on dogs as other populations did, you have no obligation to treat dogs as pets rather than as food.

Still, I have to agree with the first post that there's something icky about relying on dogs as our teammates and then eating them when it suits us. In fact, I'd push the point further. We didn't just team up with dogs. As a study in Science explained several years ago, we fed them, bred them, and spread them. My take on this is that through relentless genetic selection and breeding, we essentially invented the dog. We derived dogs from wolves by selecting those that excelled at interpreting our behavior and executing our assignments. To borrow the Biblical metaphor: We made a species in our image.

Objectively, going by intelligence alone, it still strikes me as irrational that we think it's more wrong to eat dogs than to eat pigs. Our compunction is purely subjective, based on our current or past relationships with dogs. But maybe this is one of those cases that suggests we should respect subjectivity (or, more precisely, intersubjectivity -- somebody stop me before I start quoting Habermas) as a basis for ethics. Not only is our relationship with dogs deeply enmeshed in history - arguably the most objective thing there is among people - but that history includes our creation of dogs. The nature of dogs is that we made them to suit ourselves; so if our aversion to eating them arises from the same basis, then it's based -- objectively, you might say -- on their nature.

All this philosophy has my head spinning. I'm gonna go find a simpler topic for my next post. Somebody else carry the ball from here.

Legalize Dog Meat

I feel strangely obliged to say something about today's dog-food story.

No, I'm not talking about food for dogs. I wish I were. I'm talking about making food from dogs—and serving it to people.

Yes, this is happening. It's been happening for a long time. I first wrote about it six years ago, when the soccer World Cup was coming to South Korea. In that country, at latest count, 2 to 4 million dogs are eaten each year. (This was shortly after I wrote about sex with dogs—but let's take our perversions one at a time.) Here are this week's developments, as reported yesterday by AFP:

Officials in the South Korean capital Seoul said Monday they will launch their first health inspection of illegal dog meat restaurants ... "We do not intend to regulate the selling of dog meat but to examine their safety," a food safety official told AFP ... The city will conduct regular inspections, publicize a list of restaurants that serve unhealthy dog meat and suspend their operations, he said. Such restaurants are technically illegal.

To avoid adverse publicity before the 1988 Olympics, the city banned dog meat and snake meat as "abhorrent food." But the order is now largely ignored.

"Many citizens enjoy dog meat despite the ban. But there have been no hygiene regulations on their slaughter and trade because dogs are not classed as livestock," the official said. The city government has proposed reclassifying dogs as livestock so it can set food safety standards. But the proposal, which will be sent to the central government next month, has sparked angry reactions from animal rights activists, who staged street protests and launched online signature campaigns.

Confused? I sure am. Let's sort this out. To comply with Western sensibilities, the Koreans officially banned dog meat. But they don't enforce the ban, presumably because they don't share the abhorrence. And why should they? Why exactly is it gross to eat dogs but OK to slaughter pigs, which, by most measures, are smarter? So we've started with irrationality compounded by hypocrisy.

Now we have a health problem. According to the article, Korean dog "slaughtering and processing is carried out in dirty environments and poses risks to diners' health." Why the dirty environments? Apparently because the formal ban prevents the government from classifying dogs as livestock so it can regulate their slaughter and processing as it does with pigs.

What are animal-rights activists doing about this? They're trying to stop the reclassification, which means, in effect, preserving the risks to human health.

In general, I have a soft spot for animal rights. Not just for adopting puppies, but for the broader agenda of recognizing higher animals as way smarter than we've given them credit for. I keep an entire directory of news clips about all the amazing things animals can do. (Here's a trivial example from this week's news file; here's a far more profound one from last week's file.) The reason we've underestimated animals is that we've overestimated ourselves. We haven't studied them carefully enough. When we do, we keep finding "new" abilities.

Conservatives who preach a binary distinction between human dignity and the status of animals will be in for many rude shocks as this research proceeds. And, for the rest of you, I'm sorry to say that your practice—and mine—of slaughtering and eating sentient beings will gradually be recognized, God willing, as barbaric and obsolete.

So that's my lefty position on eating animals. But I'm afraid it doesn't lead me to the same conclusion as the Korean animal-rights lobby. If dogs are no better than pigs, I don't see the point of maintaining the current hypocritical distinction, particularly at the expensive of human health.

The Korean debate also appeals to my libertarian pragmatism. One reason I'm against abortion bans is that abortions will happen anyway; they'll just be more dangerous to the born people involved, in addition to killing the unborn. The piety of being able to claim you've outlawed abortion doesn't amount to much next to the harm and suffering you cause by driving abortions underground. I'm for bringing it out in the open. I'd like to believe that if a practice is truly immoral and unnecessary, sunshine will lead to its erosion. In the case of abortion, the latest statistics seem to bear out that belief.

So I guess I'm for 1) getting rid of the hypocritical distinction between dogs and livestock, 2) legalizing and regulating dog meat like other meat, and 3) gradually persuading everybody, including us pious Westerners, to stop eating meat.

Note to self: How do I square this with my previous piece about fetal sex selection, which warned that reducing regulation of an abhorrent practice to "a mere question of consumer protection" leads us to declare it "adequately regulated" and no longer taboo? I'll have to keep, um, chewing on that one. In the meantime, all you pro-life vegetarians can feel free to consider me a hypocrite.

The DNA Age

My colleague Jack Shafer says the Pulitzers are a fraud. "There's no real science or even fairness behind the picking of winners and losers," he wrote in a piece published four years ago and reprinted last week, after this year's winners were announced. In particular, he noted, "I doubt that one newspaper reader in 10,000 could tell you a day after the Pulitzers are awarded who got the prize for explanatory reporting."

Well, never argue with Shafer. Except this once. The winner of this year's prize for explanatory reporting deserved every bit of it, not just for her terrific writing, but because, for the past two years, she's been pioneering the journalism of the next century.

The prize announcement salutes Amy Harmon of the New York Times for her "examination of the dilemmas and ethical issues that accompany DNA testing." Harmon's series, "The DNA Age," has actually covered far more than that. It began two years ago and has weaved its way through a thicket of emerging controversies. Her opening topic was people who used DNA tests to establish unexpected ancestry—such as whites claiming to be black, or Christians claiming to be Jewish—in order to gain the ensuing advantages in areas such as minority admissions, Israeli citizenship, or Native American entitlements. Then she turned to the psychological and social effects of studies that tell us much of our behavior is genetically influenced.

Harmon wrote about the moral deliberations of couples who used preimplantation genetic diagnosis to weed out embryos that might carry or pass on diseases. She talked to parents of Down syndrome kids, who worried that the eradication of Down fetuses by prenatal tests would turn their children, in the public's mind, from disabled people into freakish burdens that should never have been brought to term. She detailed our increasingly methodical genetic engineering of dogs as a potential preview of genetic engineering of human beings. She introduced us to women who had healthy breasts surgically removed based on genetic predictions of cancer. She explored fears that analyses of average genetic and trait differences among populations might foment a "new era of racism." She chronicled the emerging ability to Google your own DNA. She wrote about families who use the Internet to find and bond with other families over shared genetic disorders.

Last month, Harmon looked at "genomic elitism," the practice among rich people of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a full DNA analysis normal people couldn't afford. And a week ago, she scrutinized "surreptitious sampling," the law-enforcement technique of obtaining incriminating DNA samples by testing cells and fluids you inadvertently leave in public places every day.

Half of what's amazing about this body of work is that nobody else has done anything quite like it. In retrospect, the trends Harmon has covered will be recognized as the story of our age. We're living in an era of science and technology. Discoveries about ourselves and the world, coupled with our increasing power to transform both, are changing how we live, what we think, and who we are. This is happening at a pace unheard of in previous generations. In Sunday's Washington Post, another of my favorite science writers, Joel Achenbach, points out:

The most important things happening in the world today won't make tomorrow's front page. They won't get mentioned by presidential candidates or Chris Matthews or Bill O'Reilly or any of the other folks yammering and snorting on cable television. They'll be happening in laboratories—out of sight, inscrutable and unhyped until the very moment when they change life as we know it. Science and technology form a two-headed, unstoppable change agent.

The fact that such developments are now being recognized by the Pulitzer board and are blanketing the Post's Sunday opinion section is, in itself, good news.

But that's only half the reason to applaud Harmon's award. The other half is the way she has covered—or, in her case, invented—the beat. Lots of writers, including me, have opined about the abstract virtues or evils of biotechnology. We think we're being visionary or "morally serious." But real moral seriousness isn't about abstractions. It's about flesh and blood: the real people in whom, and in whose lives, the abstractions take shape. You can't really understand or explain abortion, war, or economic globalization until you've talked to people who have been through it. The same is true of biotechnology. If you go in with moral assumptions, the experiences you see or hear about may change your mind, or at least complicate it. That's part of the point of reporting, not to mention reading.

I can't do justice to "The DNA Age" in a blog post. Read it for yourself. It's as provocative as any sci-fi collection and as nuanced as any novel. Except it's real.