Dogs are known not only to be victims of prostate cancer, but also to help in the attempt to fight the disease. This is because various research and experiments are carried out on dogs before they can be tested on humans.

Naturally, there are those who would frown at this thought, but the truth is, you can’t eat your cake and have it. You can’t just jump out on the street, grab a human being and start experimenting on him; and even if the human volunteered for the procedure, you’ll certainly want to save that person for a later stage when you’re more confident that the technique or treatment he’s working on is much more reliable.

By the way, the usefulness of dogs in prostate cancer treatment research was already demonstrated almost a hundred years ago when Charles Brenton Huggins discovered that prostate carcinoma cells in dogs responded to hormonal treatments by halting or even reversing their progression. . It was the first step in improving hormone therapy and making it one of the preferred prostate cancer treatments we have today.

Huggins won the Nobel Prize for that find, by the way; and I don’t know about you, but I would rather he was the dog than me. Societies like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) may frown on this, but if the tests save human lives, I don’t think there’s anything too far-fetched about that. Other animals used in such tests include rodents, cats, and reptiles.