Cat Organ Transplants 44
sophie baines writes "Vets have given their approval for cats to have kidney transplants in the UK-despite ethical concerns about the procedure.
Liverpool University is believed to be one of the few veterinary teaching centres around the country to have the advanced specialist equipment needed to carry out the operation."
Activism for the sake of activism? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a cat! I've got two cats. While I will certainly agree that they have a mind of their own (and for some reason think that the best place to be is underfoot while I'm walking in the morning), but consent??? It's a cat...
"Mr. Whiskers, this is a risky operation with potential complications. It is entirely possible that you could die due to this surgery. I still advise you to have it done, as your organs are failing and you won't live much longer without a transplant. We have a ready donor, do you give your consent for this transplant to be done?"
"Meow."
Boggling what people will do to have a cause.
Re:Activism for the sake of activism? (Score:1)
Second, it's not right to put humans _always_ above animals and plants. We have to realize once in our lifetime that human life is not the most important thing in this world but life itself. And life itself cannon exist without animal and plants.
Re:Activism for the sake of activism? (Score:2)
On a less humorous note, it is right to put humans_always_above animas and plants. Given the choice between killing a person, an animal, or an acre of trees, I'll take my meat fried and when can you print some news on that bark?
Philosophical difference between us there will probably never be resolved.
Re:Activism for the sake of activism? (Score:3, Insightful)
So? Parents make identical decisions for their children - there's no consent from the child in those cases either. And as a cat-owner, I consider my cat to be my baby... if she needed a transplant, you're damn right I'll make the decision for her. This [the "ethical concern"] is an absolutely ridiculous argument that has no bearing on how people feel about their pets.
Choice and consent (Score:5, Insightful)
We decide for them where they go, what they eat, when to bath, push them away when we want.
We let them locked inside when there's nobody home, we decide when and why they lose their reproductive abilities. If they need medication, we push it inside their throats.
Yeah, like people care for choice and consent from cats.
What kind of freedom is that?!
Re:Choice and consent (Score:2)
Huh, nevermind, you were talking about cats, I see...
Re:Activism for the sake of activism? (Score:5, Insightful)
So do I. But I think it's more of an issue for the donor animal. It may be OK for us to decide that kitty1 should recieve a donor kidney otherwise it won't survive, but is it OK to force a healthy kitty2 to donate said kidney? Then it's more of an ethical dilema, i.e. people getting animals from rescue shelters for donor body parts.
The consent of the owners, moron. (Score:1, Flamebait)
What some people will say to complain about people with a cause...
Re:The consent of the owners, moron. (Score:2)
Go read the article. The loonies are raising concerns about the cat's consent -- or did you think that vets were sneaking into people's houses and operating on their cats without their consent?
Re:Activism for the sake of activism? (Score:2)
Consent isn't exactly the right word, really, but it describes a similar situation. You can't explain to a cat (or dog, or rat, or snake, or whatever) why it is going through all this pain. You can't say "just deal with the pain for a while, and in the long run it'll be for the best." From their point of view, it just looks like people are hurting them. Think about it: you don't mind the doctor giving you a pill to take, but you would be really disturbed and unhappy if the doctor tried to choke you. To a cat, there is no difference, because they don't know that the pill is for their own good.
So, when I see something like kidney transplants, where a cat who is usually old and has lived a good life goes through a bunch of nasty surgury and is forced to go on anti-rejection drugs (which are notorious for their nasty side effects), I think it's time to deal with it and put the poor animal down. Do you really want your loved pet's last years to be lived in confused misery? Do you want then to be convinced that whole time that it is you who is hurting them, and for no reason?
I think it is more about donor's "consent" (Score:1)
If you "repair" your cat at the cost of another cat, I feel that it isn't seen as a living beeing, but as a thing.
And in the end, a cat isn't afraid of death. It is your egoism to keep something that you own.
Re:I think it is more about donor's "consent" (Score:1)
An organ dontated from a cat that has already died, OK, but never should any healthy animal lose its life just because another could benefit from its organs.
If the donor is still alive, how could you even humanely put it down, because such measures, AFAIK, would render that animals organs unhealthy. So the poor unwilling "donor" animal doesn't even get put down humanely, that if you ask me is cruelty, and criminal.
It's never a question of consent, even if he could speak a language, an animal will never consent to its own organs being taken. I'll give blood and criticism, but until I die, nothing else.
What about my dog? (Score:4, Funny)
Where do you get the replacement parts? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Where do you get the replacement parts? (Score:2)
You could keep replacing bits... end up with this uber-cat made up of parts from lesser cats!
Hell forget genetic engineering... make your dream cat frankenstein style
I can see the man walking into the pet store:
"I'll take the cute ginger one in the corner... the one with the green eyes... and that playful one..... errr... and a scalpel"
Re:Where do you get the replacement parts? (Score:3, Funny)
'cat' already means to merge two entities together, so I guess this operation can be summed up as:
cat Cat1 Kidney(Cat2) ???
Re:Where do you get the replacement parts? (Score:2)
I don't know how it is currently done, but I believe that a typical animal shelter (not a "no kill" shelter) kills many cats a day. If a shelter were going to kill a donor cat at a given time regardless of whether that cat was going to be an organ donor, then I don't think it would be crueler for them to instead do the donor surgery that the cat does not wake up from.
Both of my cats have ID chips, so I don't think an animal shelter would kill them as long as my phone still works, but, I think that if I found out that some pet of mine had been killed in a shelter due to a faulty ID chip or whatever, it would, if anything, console me a bit know that a kidney had been used to save another pet, provided that I was convinced that the demand for the kidney had not accelerated the time to kill my pet.
What else could you spend this cash on? (Score:4, Insightful)
I also wonder how someone can justify paying this sort of money... thinking of the starving children, etc, etc. Maybe a compulsory tour of a human hospital to look at lack of funding might be in order for people that would pay for this...
Re:What else could you spend this cash on? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you ate rice and fish every day and sent the savings you made to the starving children of Africa, you'd save dozens of lives. I don't see people doing it though.
Re:What else could you spend this cash on? (Score:2)
Or rather, you could keep some tin-pot military dictator in palaces and arms for the rest of his life, but assuming this could be avoided, your point is still well made.
Speaking as someone who spent an exorbitant amount (Score:1)
She's still with me. I made a choice based on my earnest belief that I had a chance to help a creature who was in need. I probably wouldn't have made this choice for a stray, choosing first to support the 'higher issues' that people are referring to here- other people, for example. And if she hadn't lived, I still believe that it would have been worth it. Why? Because I couldn't live with the thought that I had let her die without trying. That's why these people will pay for these transplants.
Part guilt, part love. I know my time with her is limited. Eventually, her hips will give out due the calcification there, and her fused-from-the-middle-down spine won't give her the flexibility to work around it. and the hours of physical therapy i've done with her- yeah, I know, physical therapy for a cat- won't be able to make up for it, and to ease her discomfort she'll be put to sleep. But in the meantime, she fell asleep with her head on my arm last night. She won't last till they have replacement parts. Too many things wrong. But how do you look at an animal that you've accepted into your family- and that's the key moral issue for most people- and deny them treatment that might let them live?
it isn't necessarily right, but we make our choices based on what affects us closest to home first. It takes a lot of guts and perspective to accept those other issues out there- poverty, hunger, disease, the ecological state of our planet- as part of our own household.
Just some thoughts; feel free to pick apart and disagree.
PAIN (Score:2)
Cat expressiveness (Score:1)
I think people underestimate exactly how much one learns when living in close concert with other creatures. So long as she's interested in life- interested in interacting with the world around her, and i don't mean whether she's bored... if her eyes get that glassy listless look, her coat gets dull, and she mewls in pain when she moves, that's when i'll know she's hurting most. Until then, we deal with day-to-day pains as they come up, and she seems really interested in life and living and the world around her.
Re:PAIN (Score:2)
I don't have cats around but I bet with cats even if you're totally stupid they'll let you know in very obvious ways. You'd be sharing their pain if you're not careful.
If the cat is comatose or unresponsive then the operation sure didn't work.
I'm sure if you are good friends with another animal you'd know even if it's in a bit of pain, not even excruciating.
But women? They're probably from some other planet. Just kidding
Re:What else could you spend this cash on? (Score:2)
I pay my vet a lot of money to take care of sick animals. My vet employees several employees and some interns.
Those interns have school bills to pay. The vet school funds research activity that may lead to a better quality of life for humans and animals alike.
My vet and her employees buy groceries, which keeps the local grocer in business, which allows him to pay his employees, etc, etc..
Money is never wasted unless it goes unspent.
Re:What else could you spend this cash on? (Score:2)
Re:What else could you spend this cash on? (Score:2)
Just because they care for the cat doesn't necessarily mean they don't care for the starving children around the world. The two are not tightly linked issues. It seems almost a fallacy to link these to with an "either or" sort of thing.
Most times there's very little you can do directly about the children starving (look at Africa - practically all the starving is due to politics), but if you can do something for the sick cat why not?
Whether I buy lunch for a street dog/cat has practically zero effect on starving kids or some underfunded hospital. But I can be sure it has effect on the dog/cat.
Most people likely to spend such money on their cats are rich enough that whether they spend money on their cat or not has very little impact on whether they donate to a charity _you_ approve of.
Why shouldn't they spend money on a cat they love?
Could do far worse with your money than to spend it on a living creature you love. You might as well start with those you love, and then work on extending the reach of your love. More likely to do the right thing this way, than to do it because of guilt or obligation or some other reason.
Actually... (Score:5, Informative)
... my sister is a vet who was working at the University of Florida, Gainseville teaching centre. She's performed the procedure several times. Successfully, too!
Re:Actually... (Score:4, Funny)
Oh my god! What's wrong with your cat?
Nothing, my cat is fine.
What are those lumps all over it?!?!
Oh, those are kidneys. I've transplanted several kidneys into it, and I ran out of room in the usual places.
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Re:Actually... (Score:2)
She's performed the procedure several times on different cats, weisenheimer! =)
hmm.. (Score:1)
Flight Com! I can't hold it! (Score:4, Funny)
Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first bionic cat. Steve Austin will be that cat. Better than he was before. Better
Re:Flight Com! I can't hold it! (Score:2)
Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first bionic cat. Steve Austin will be that cat. Better than he was before. Better ... stronger ... faster.
Yeah, but will he still shed cat fur all over the house? And will he continue to insist on dropping his little "cat nuggets" ONCE FRIGGIN' INCH OUTSIDE OF THE DAMN LITTER BOX!?!
GMD
already done in the US? (Score:4, Insightful)
I recently had one of my cats euthanized for chronic renal failure (he had a blood clot in his legs and tail and couldn't walk, among other things) and I learned how some people spent thousands of dollars to transplant kidneys or perform regular dialysis.
I didn't read about any particular ethical concerns, just the vets shrugging and saying "if you really want to do it, and you have the money, it's possible".
But my belief is that 1) it's just a cat, you'll get over any grief; and 2) there comes a point when treating your pet that you are no longer doing it *for* the animal, you're doing it *to* the animal for your own selfish wishes. At that point it's better to euthanize.
A cat with transplanted kidneys will never be the same anyway, he will have to take constant
immunosuppressants and other drugs just to stay alive, and will have constant complications and will not be a very happy cat.
My $0.02 as a cat lover.
Re:already done in the US? (Score:1)
My furball [ste-marie.org] has been getting that daily for the last seven years, and he's quite happy. Even purrs while he's getting the fluids. Only side effects is that he sloshes [ste-marie.org] for a while after the injection.
Re:already done in the US? (Score:2)
What does the fluid therapy do? Is it for cats with bad kidneys or for cats with transplanted kidneys or both?
Re:already done in the US? (Score:1)
re: consent (Score:1)
ethical issues about consent for a cat are ridiculous. You're effectively a parent to a creature which cant make sophisticated choices like this. People get surgery on their kids every day. A good example is surgery to detach conjoined twins from each other. Sometimes its medically unnecessary, and nobody asks the kids (when theyre young that is).
So whats better: "Mr Johnson, we can give your cat a kidney transplant, but we wont be liable if he sues!" or "Mr Johnson, Im sorry.. we have to kill your cat."
Grow it in a petri dish (Score:2)
But this has the potential of generating a lot of money for cloning and stem cell research. Already there is a lot of pet cloning going on (although at the 6 figure price tag I won't be cloning my kitty anytime soon) Hopefully this will create a demand for cloned pet parts which will have the direct effect of funding research in these areas.
Hmm, Chia Kidney, just add water and watch it grow.