London, Ont. — Surrounded by security staff, an unmarked white van pulls up to a receiving door behind St. Joseph’s Hospital. Scrub-clad staff quickly remove large boxes covered with blankets from the van and slide them into the building.
Hidden beneath those blankets are puppies in cages headed for the hospital’s sixth-floor research lab, according to two staffers.
WARNING: This story has some disturbing details and images that may be distressing to some readers
Their way out will most likely be in garbage bags.
Researchers inside the hospital’s
Lawson Research Institute
, studying heart attack recovery in humans, use the dogs as stand ins. They induce up to three-hour-long heart attacks in the animals before killing them and removing their hearts, according to internal photos, documents and two current staff members who work there.
It is a clandestine process that has successfully kept the hospital’s long-standing dog research program hidden from the public and patients.
The publicly funded research has been reviewed and approved. The hospital says the dogs are treated ethically in the service of medical advancement that benefits the public.
But some experts interviewed by the
Investigative Journalism Bureau
(IJB) say the use of dogs in these experiments is both unnecessary and unethical. And the two whistleblowers call their work deeply troubling.
Under strict orders of confidentiality, staff bring the puppies — as young as 10 months and as old as two years when they arrive from U.S. breeders — into the hospital. According to one whistleblower, they play loud music to drown out the barking.
“We turn the radio on as loud as we can when we’re in there,” says the staffer who spoke with the IJB on condition of anonymity. “We’re not even allowed to throw animal food bags into the regular garbage. We conceal them in other bags so no one knows we have animal food.”
Videos obtained by the IJB filmed at St. Joseph’s in April show three security guards surrounding a white van that pulls up to a hospital side door. Three people in scrubs wheel carts with blanket-covered boxes the size of dog crates from the van into the hospital. After bringing in the first cart, a person runs back to the van before wheeling in a second blanket-covered cart.
“We have to call security to come and guard the entrance,” a staffer says. “There’ll be at least five or six of them surrounding everything, making sure no one enters the vicinity.”
The dogs are then moved to the sixth floor by elevator.
One floor below, the puppies’ hearts are analyzed on the same MRI and PET scanning machines that are used for human patients.
Images staff say were taken inside the facility show dogs in cages with no beds. In one video, a dog lies motionless after a procedure, whimpering in high-pitched whistle tones.
“They’re scared, they’re alone for 23 hours every day,” says one staffer. “It feels like this shouldn’t be happening.”
The hospital’s written statement says the animals are treated with “compassion and respect, and their welfare remains a top priority,” including access to 24/7 veterinary care, outdoor runs, socialization and “psychological well-being.” The hospital said they are provided with indoor beds.
A section of the study protocol details potential repercussions to the animals, including “stroke and/or respiratory distress” and “tense body position, i.e., tucked in abdomen, not eating/drinking, depressed, limping.”
Following the procedures, the puppies are killed and their hearts are removed for further study, internal study protocol documents show.
The dogs killed at St. Joseph’s Hospital are among thousands that are subject to scientific testing in Canada every year. In fact, dog testing doubled between 2020 and 2023 in Canada — reaching 16,000 dogs used in research studies certified by the
Canadian Council on Animal Care
(CCAC) in 2023 alone.
By comparison, less than 9,000 dogs were used for scientific study across the European Union in 2022.
The actual number of dogs used in medical research in Canada is likely much higher than CCAC figures because many studies that don’t rely on federal funding are not certified by the CCAC.
“There’s nothing that stops an institution in the private sector from conducting [animal] science without being certified,” said Pierre Verreault, executive director of the CCAC. “We don’t like it, obviously, and that’s something we’re talking about with the government that should be changed.”
The St. Joseph’s statement says Health Canada and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) require animal-tested protocols as “proof-of-principle for efficacy and safety before new treatments can be used in human patients.”
In April, the
FDA announced
a “groundbreaking” step to replace animal testing in some drug development with “more effective, human-relevant methods.
“For too long, drug manufacturers have performed additional animal testing of drugs that have data in broad human use internationally. This initiative marks a paradigm shift in drug evaluation,” said FDA commissioner Martin A. Makary. “By leveraging AI-based computational modeling, human organ model-based lab testing, and real-world human data, we can get safer treatments to patients faster and more reliably…It is a win-win for public health and ethics.”
Canada has no federal legislation regulating animal welfare in scientific research and no one has ever been criminally prosecuted for harming animals in teaching or scientific experimentation.
Code of silence
Animal-based research at St. Joseph’s Hospital — which also includes pigs and rodents — remains closely guarded under instructions from the lab’s leadership, say two current staff members who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
“It’s top secret, not even people [working] at the hospital know about it,” said one. “It’s an unspoken code we have to go by whenever we’re in there. We’re not allowed to talk about it with anyone, even the people we work with, unless we’re in the facility.”
In an April 12 email to staff, Steven Back, manager of research operations at Lawson Research Institute, emphasized that “confidentiality is critical.”
The email warned employees against sharing information “observed or obtained while working” with “unauthorized groups,” and forbids work-related communication, including “discussing your day” in the hospital cafeteria.
Websites for both
St. Joseph’s
and Lawson make no reference to animals or animal testing.
Even within the hospital, staff refer to the facility as the “secret sixth floor,” said one of the staffers.
“I don’t think you need to hide something if you actually believe that what you’re doing isn’t wrong in any way,” the staffer said.
Officials at St. Joseph’s and Lawson Research Institute declined interview requests.
In a written statement responding to questions from the IJB, they said that while there is an “ethical cost” to using animals in medical research, “we take the matter of animal welfare very seriously. Animal research is often a necessary step in translating innovative therapies and diagnostic tests into clinical practice, improving the health and survival rate of humans.”
The hospital also said its security protocols are standard.
“All science involving animals requires security and biosecurity measures to protect the animals, staff and the integrity of the research.”
And conducting this research in a hospital has the advantage of ensuring “clinical need and expertise is closely aligned with the research that is happening.”
Model human cardiac injury
The IJB reviewed about 100 pages of documents detailing the internal testing protocols, which were approved by Western University’s internal Animal Care Committee — a partner of Lawson and St. Joseph’s — in accordance with guidelines set by the CCAC.
The purpose of the research, detailed in internal documents, is to better understand how heart failure develops after a heart attack and test interventions that could reduce long-term harm by using dogs to model human cardiac injury.
Researchers block blood flow to the heart, which starves the heart muscle of oxygen and induces a heart attack.
The induced heart attacks last between 70 minutes and three hours, the documents said.
Dogs then undergo heart imaging in MRI and PET scanners and are monitored, often for weeks, before being euthanized. While the dogs are meant to survive the initial heart attack, up to half do not, according to internal research protocol notes.
The hope is to “translate to human medicine as soon as possible.”
Some experts are skeptical.
“Dogs are not 50-pound humans,” said Dr. John Pippin, a cardiovascular surgeon who previously performed heart attack research on dogs and now advocates for animal-free research as the director of academic affairs at the
Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.
“They have distinctly different anatomy. They have different genetic characteristics that do not translate to humans. You can’t do anything to make them transferable to human medicine.”
More than 90 per cent of drugs tested on animals never receive approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration due to safety and efficacy issues. A 2024 meta analysis of more than 120 academic papers on the subject found just five per cent of therapies tested in animals end up as human drugs. Canada does not publish comparable figures.
Internationally, researchers are conducting cardiac research with healthy human volunteers or patients undergoing cardiac treatments, said Charu Chandrasekera, founder of the Canadian Centre for Alternatives to Animal Methods and an international expert in animal-free science.
“While clinically relevant studies were being published, tracking how human hearts recover after a heart attack, researchers in Canada were busy filling out forms to order more dogs. The goal should be to expand human data, not invent new dog experiments.”
The written statement from St. Joseph’s said effective alternatives to dog testing “don’t yet exist for this specific line of inquiry,” and that “these techniques are essential for providing clinical teams with tools that permit proper diagnosis and treatment for one of the leading causes of death in Canada.”
Frank Prato, the founder of the Lawson Imaging Research Program and lead researcher of the studies, has a long history of academic publications involving dog research dating back to at least 1983. Prato has been sacrificing dogs in his studies since at least 1985, according to a dog lung study published that year.
His
biography
on the St. Joseph’s website does not reference dog testing of any kind. It reads: “Over the last 30 years I have founded a research imaging program at Lawson…The focus is to provide leading edge medical imaging technology to the patients of Southwestern Ontario.”
Since 2020, Prato has received nearly $500,000 in grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) to perform these studies at Lawson. NSERC grants are publicly funded through federal tax dollars.
The IJB reached out to Prato for comment. He did not directly respond.
The study protocols reviewed by reporters show Prato’s current research received approval to test on 225 dogs over four years.
A written statement from St. Joseph’s says the number of “adult” dogs killed annually is 15. Asked to explain the discrepancy, the hospital says it has improved “processes” that resulted in using fewer animals.
The IJB asked the hospital for the total number of dogs of all ages that were killed as part of research at the lab over the past five years. It declined to provide an answer.
“We appreciate the importance of transparency and are working in alignment with regulatory bodies and partners to follow their protocols in this regard,” the response said.
The CCAC also declined to disclose the number of dogs approved for use at St. Joseph’s Hospital.
“We want to bring more transparency so we’re pushing institutions to…disclose,” Verreault said. “Most European countries have a transparency agreement where institutions disclose more every year.”
Whatever the number, St. Joseph’s written statement said the use of dogs in its research has a dramatic positive impact on human health.
“It is estimated that more than 10,000 patients benefit annually for every dog included in this research.”
The hospital said the figures are based on “our researchers’ expert analysis of the prevalence of heart disease, our clinical experience and the subsequent impact of research findings to evolve diagnosis and treatment.”
Chandrasekera said she’s never heard of that metric for measuring the impact of animal testing.
“It’s scientifically and statistically implausible to make such a claim,” she said. “If we could quantify animal research like that, I don’t think we’d have the controversy over animal research.”
Lori Cohen, executive director of the Beagle Alliance, an animal-free science advocacy organization, said awareness of the research program would trigger “overwhelming outrage.”
“It is a secret because how could you not act and be outraged if you saw the treatment of some of those animals?” Cohen said. “I think it is an ethical crime.
The research conducted at St. Joseph’s was approved in accordance with CCAC guidelines. But experts say the CCAC oversight is limited.
While the organization sets the overall ethical research standards that each institution’s animal care committee use to assess studies, it does not evaluate each individual research proposal for ethical considerations.
Institutions in Canada that use animals in their research must be CCAC-certified to receive federal funding.
“There are no ethics reviews [by the CCAC],” said Andrew Fenton, co-chair of the CCAC’s ethics guidelines development committee. “That means that ethics is not a part of the funding decision.”
Verreault confirmed the CCAC did not review the ethics of St. Joseph’s dog studies.
“They have zero authority to punish anyone who violates animal welfare guidelines because they are not a federal agency like in the United States or other countries,” said Chandrasekera.
CCAC’s Verreault said that in his eight years with the organization, it has only revoked an institution’s certification once.
In its written statement, the hospital said its animal research is peer reviewed by “current leaders in the field” who determine whether the work is “not only necessary but is cutting edge.”
A panel of experts also considers whether the “potential benefits to human or societal health outweigh the ethical costs of involving animals in the study. These decisions are never made lightly,” the statement reads.
The CCAC conducts institutional reviews of its members at least every three years. They are not released publicly. Organizations can, and sometimes do, make them public.
The Lawson lab at St. Joseph’s was most recently reviewed by the CCAC in November 2024 and found to be “in good standing with several commendations on the high quality of animal care and ethics,” the hospital’s written statement said.
In response to the IJB’s request for a copy of the review, the hospital wrote, “The CCAC report is a document involving multiple organizations and therefore is not available for external distribution.”
Humane alternative to euthanasia
In February, a lawyer with animal rights organization Animal Justice wrote to senior leaders at the Lawson Research Institute, raising concerns about “painful cardiac experiments” and how the dogs are brought back to a “healthy state only to then be euthanized.”
The letter contains an offer to facilitate a more “humane alternative to euthanasia for these animals” by rehoming dogs that have undergone surgery after the experimentation.
“Rehoming these dogs would not only align with ethical considerations but could also demonstrate a commitment to animal welfare that reflects positively on St. Joseph’s Hospital.”
In a March response, Lisa Porter, vice-president of research at Lawson Research Institute, said the organization is “committed to ethical research” and “guided by rigorous policies and procedures for high-quality animal care.”
Porter didn’t comment on Animal Justice’s offer, but stated that they rehome dogs “whenever possible.” The statement provided to the IJB repeated that statement.
“I understand from multiple sources that while St. Joe’s may have rehomed a couple dogs in the past, this has not occurred in close to a decade, and there are currently no efforts to offer a second chance to dogs who have faced experimentation,” said Camille Labchuk, executive director of Animal Justice.
The two staff members also said they have not seen any dogs from the studies rehomed.
In a subsequent written statement to the IJB, St. Joseph’s said: “To date, 13 dogs involved in our research have been rehomed. No dogs have been eligible for rehoming in the past 5 years.”
After the dogs are killed, staff put the carcasses in garbage bags and move them into massive barrels in the freezer, said the staffers.
A photo obtained by the IJB shows a barrel inside the facility labelled “Subject name: Croissant, Toast, Rye and Bagel.” A staffer confirmed those were the names of euthanized dogs inside the barrel.
“They pile the dog bodies on top of each other, keep them there until the barrel is completely full, and then ship it off,” said one. “It’s not just distressing, it’s emotionally abusive, and it takes a toll on everyone.”
The Investigative Journalism Bureau (IJB) at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health is a collaborative investigative newsroom supported by Postmedia that partners with academics, researchers and journalists while training the next generation of investigative reporters.
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