100 Dogs Who Changed Civilization (3 page)

Even with the help of the priciest, most advanced medical equipment, detecting cancer in its early stages can be difficult—unless you happen to be a dog. Scientists have discovered that when it comes to finding some forms of this deadly disease, a sensitive, well-trained nose may work better than the highest of high technology.

The idea of dogs sniffing out tumors as if they were rabbits seems absurd. How can a canine, no matter how finely tuned its 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 beginning
stages. 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 easier
to 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.

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 Great Britain's Anti-Vivisection Society, who publicly accused the doctor responsible for the Brown Dog of not properly anesthetizing him,
as the law required, and of using the animal for more than one experiment, which was also illegal.

The doctor promptly sued Coleridge for libel, but though he won the legal case, he lost in the court of public opinion. A furious uproar over the dog's treatment erupted in the press, with one tabloid raising £5,735 to pay Coleridge's court fine. Things really heated up when a monument to Brown Dog was raised in London. Unveiled on September 15, 1906, it was an innocuous-looking water fountain with a bronze dog on top and an incendiary inscription dedicating it, “In Memory of the Brown Terrier Dog done to Death in the Laboratories of University College in February 1903 … [after] … having been handed from one Vivisector to another till Death came to his Release.”

Large-scale riots ensued as London medical students, bent on defacing the monument, fought running battles with neighborhood toughs. The statue was finally removed in 1910 and, it is presumed, destroyed. But the Brown Dog, and what he represented, wasn't forgotten. In 1985 a new statue was unveiled in the London neighborhood of Battersea, bearing the same searing indictment of animal experimentation. But this time, no one came to the practice's defense.

One can't overestimate the importance of Florence Nightingale to the medical profession. Born in 1820, the daughter of rich, upper-crust English parents, Nightingale was expected to become an obedient wife, tucked away in a country manor. Instead, she chose a life of service by becoming a nurse, one of the era's most reviled professions. And no wonder. At the time, the typical “nurse” was an ill-trained orderly with little more medical knowledge than a scullery maid.

But Nightingale changed all that. She studied well-run hospitals throughout Europe and became a crusader for a then-revolutionary concept: namely, that a clean, well-organized infirmary staffed by knowledgeable, sympathetic caregivers was better than a dirty, disorganized one staffed by callous, incompetent boobs—which pretty much summed up the typical facility of her era.

She became an international celebrity during the Crimean War, in which Great Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire battled Russia for control of the Crimean Peninsula. Military hospital conditions were such a scandal that Nightingale, along with a small corps of volunteer nurses, was dispatched
by Britain's secretary of war to see what could be done. By a Herculean effort, she organized the relief program so efficiently that the hospital death rate sank from 42 percent to 2 percent. Nightingale returned home a national hero and used her fame to work tirelessly for hospital reform until her death in 1910.

What inspired her all-consuming interest in helping others? Perhaps it was an incident that took place in 1837, when Nightingale was only seventeen years old. One day, an old shepherd informed her that his dog, Cap, had been severely injured when some boys threw stones at him. One rock seemingly broke his leg, which meant he couldn't herd sheep. The shepherd couldn't afford to keep a lame dog, so he planned to kill Cap that evening.

Nightingale, appalled, asked permission to visit the dog. She and a companion discovered that his leg was severely bruised, but not broken, and carefully bandaged it. A few days later, Cap was his old self.

Soon thereafter Nightingale dreamed that God was calling her to devote her life to medicine. And the young girl, more than a little inspired by her work with Cap, heeded the call.

Plenty of canines have pulled sleds through the Arctic and Antarctic, but one intrepid dog, a wiry Jack Russell terrier named Bothie, got to visit both the top and the bottom of the world without ever even laying eyes on a sled.

The little dog belonged to famed British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes and his wife, Virginia. He was acquired in 1977, two years before the couple left on the Transglobe Expedition to circumnavigate the planet via the poles, a trek they had planned for the better part of a decade. By aircraft and ship, they would travel around the world from pole to pole, first visiting Antarctica, then finishing up at the Arctic.

Bothie couldn't go on the first leg of the expedition, which cut through Africa. The threat of disease and the extreme heat were considered too much for him. But once the group took to the seas on their own ship, the little terrier was flown in, equipped with his own harness to tether him to the deck during rough weather. He was also spared the long overland trek to the heart of Antarctica. Once the expedition reached that goal in January 1980, he was brought in by plane and furnished with
cold-weather gear that included special caps, booties, and body stockings.

Many months later, Bothie completed the feat at the North Pole. It was the crowning moment of the Transglobe Expedition, which began in 1979 and concluded on August 29, 1982. Not surprisingly, Bothie became a celebrity. He was voted Great Britain's Pet of the Year in 1982, and in 1983 he was allowed to do a circuit of honor in the show ring at Crufts, the world's most prestigious dog show. But perhaps even better, Bothie found a girlfriend during his adventures. While in the Yukon he met an enormous Newfoundland-husky-Labrador cross who was named Black Dog by her human associates. The
two spent the rest of the trip together, and, after being parted for several months in mandatory quarantine once they got to Great Britain, remained a couple thereafter.