Dogs, Death & Smoking

Medical researchers have tried for years to train laboratory animals to smoke. And as if in testament to the animals' innate wisdom, the training always failed. It did, that is, until Dr. Oscar Auerbach, a pathologist at the East Orange, N.J., Veterans Administration Hospital, finally found a way to force the habit. In relentless pursuit of a sure link between lung damage and smoking, Dr. Auerbach turned on man's best friend, specifically the trusting little beagle.

Willingly Hooked. For his experiments, he told the A.M.A., he opened the throats of nine males and one female with a tracheostomy. When they were accustomed to breathing through the permanent holes in their necks, the dogs were hooked up to a smoking machine every morning and afternoon. After a cigarette was lit, the dogs were permitted to inhale at will. After five straight puffs, they were given a few breaths of fresh air. They were broken in gently on just one filter-tip cigarette for the first few days; after seven months they had worked up to as many as a dozen regular-length nonfilters a day. Beagles were chosen because their lung structure resembles humans', and the twelve-cigarette daily dosage was considered the equivalent of heavy smoking in a man.

Like any small boy, the beagles reacted to the initial cigarettes with tears and redness of the eyes, coughing and, sometimes, nausea. After a few weeks, many of them seemed to have developed a taste for tobacco. They wagged their tails and jumped willingly into the box where they were hooked up. Then, on the 24th day of the experiment, the first dog died. The second died 205 days later, and three more died before the experiment was ended after 14 months. The remaining five were sacrificed for autopsies. Ten nonsmoking control dogs, two of them with tracheostomies, were also sacrificed.

Massive Damage. Post-mortems revealed that the lungs of the nonsmokers were entirely healthy. Damage to the smokers' lungs was massive. The lung tissue of the last two to die spontaneously was so completely destroyed that doctors had difficulty evaluating what had happened. In the others, reported Dr. Auerbach, the changes in the lungs were remarkably similar to the effects of emphysema in man. The experiment had not continued long enough to see whether cancer would develop.

Critics, including the Tobacco Institute Inc., as well as many doctors, quickly pointed out that beagles are not humans, and more important, that humans smoke differently. They rarely inhale five times in a row, and they normally do not smoke butts down to less than a quarter of an inch, as the dogs did. Nonetheless, the dead beagles provided the first controlled experimental evidence of the relationship of cigarettes to lung damage.

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