When Dogs Replace Dialysis Machines [pics]
Tue, Jul 1, 2008
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![When Dogs Replace Dialysis Machines [pics] sciencetech](http://inlinethumb54.webshots.com/37621/2247373340103691965S500x500Q85.jpg "When Dogs Replace Dialysis Machines [pics] sciencetech")
Among the most interesting of the Royal College of Art’s ‘Summer Show’ projects was Revital Cohen’s surprising new take on the ‘man-machine’ aesthetic that is every sci-fi enthusiast’s wet dream: man and animal. But why on earth would you want to use dogs for medical devices?
Revital’s designs serve two purposes: they disconnect people from the impersonal technology associated with medical procedures, but they also find a use for animals that goes beyond the norm and in some cases may help to save thousands of innocent lives - both human and animal.
The idea of transforming animals into medical devices at first glance seems like a macabre extension of sending canaries down mines but Revital’s proposals seem to strive for a beautiful symbiosis between humans and animals, a mutual dependence in which man and beast exist in perfect harmony (albeit brought together through illness). So are her ideas just pipe dreams or could they actually work in the real world?
![When Dogs Replace Dialysis Machines [pics] sciencetech](http://inlinethumb02.webshots.com/26881/2515451340103691965S500x500Q85.jpg "When Dogs Replace Dialysis Machines [pics] sciencetech")
The first part of the project revolves around the concept of the ‘Respiratory Dog’. The vast majority of greyhounds bred for racing are killed after their short career at the track ends (an estimated 7,500 to 20,000 were euthanised in 2003 alone). Revital advocates training the animal to become a respiratory assistance dog instead of simply killing it: the greyhound’s lung movements are converted into mechanical ventilation as it runs on a treadmill, the treadmill itself functioning as both interface and on/off switch. Rapid chest movements pump a bellows that pushes air into the patient’s lungs, establishing a mutually reliant relationship between man and animal - both keeping each other alive.
![When Dogs Replace Dialysis Machines [pics] sciencetech](http://inlinethumb55.webshots.com/42998/2575109630103691965S500x500Q85.jpg "When Dogs Replace Dialysis Machines [pics] sciencetech")
The second scenario envisions substituting a dialysis machine with a sheep. Revital’s scenario imagines that through a complex medical process toxins might be removed from the patient’s body through a sheep connected via blood lines to the subject and placed at the bedside at night. During the day the dialysis sheep is allowed to roam in the donor patient’s garden, grazing to cleanse its kidneys and drinking water containing salt minerals, calcium and glucose. During the night waste products from the patient’s blood are pumped out of the body, filtered through the sheep’s kidney and the blood is returned, cleaned, to the patient.
![When Dogs Replace Dialysis Machines [pics] sciencetech](http://inlinethumb43.webshots.com/32042/2920635340103691965S500x500Q85.jpg "When Dogs Replace Dialysis Machines [pics] sciencetech")
The images are startling and also, in their own way, touching. The mutual relationship not only saves lives but seems to encourage us to concentrate on making good use of the resources that grace the planet rather than subjecting ourselves to cold, inhuman machines. A nice set of ideas and a stirring piece of art, but as far as the practicalities of relying on a dog rather than a machine for respiratory aid in real life go - you must be barking.
Sources: 1
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K9 Chronicles » Blog Archive » » The Future? Says:
July 16th, 2008 at 12:13 am[...] found this fascinating piece today. It was a visionary part of The Royal College of The Arts’ Summer Show. The artist, [...]
July 1st, 2008 at 7:38 pm
sick bastards doing what they do best.
July 1st, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Wtf, this is art?
July 1st, 2008 at 9:14 pm
That is so f*cking ghoulish. Hook people up to people, pay the “assistant”, benefits, retirement… the works. But animals? Inhumane and twisted. We are who we abuse.
July 2nd, 2008 at 12:39 am
If that’s your idea of “sick bastards” then i don’t know, you have a pretty sweet life, guy. I mean i might not be all for doing weird ass stuff to animals (lol, i love the “wtf” look on the dog in the second pic. He’s all “yeah you get any closer to my wang and i swear im gonna bite your ass!”) but anyway, its not hurting them, the lamb looks pretty comfy. But as for art, ok well exploring possibilities is always good but this i think is one of those things they should have realised was stupid way before it was even close to being an actual fact. Oh and one last thing i wouldn’t be caught dead getting sheep transfusions, boost it up to like a tiger or super space dragon and then maybe I’d think about letting my blood go into something else while i sleep.;p
July 2nd, 2008 at 1:17 am
Okay, the greyhound is cool. The sheep is just sadistic.
July 2nd, 2008 at 1:23 am
Remarkable! Dialysis machines lack the enormous complexity and finesse of your kidneys (which employ hundreds of enzymes in hundreds of thousands of metabolic pathways to cleans blood. A dialysis machine is essentially our best approximation of the system, and it is an extremely poor substitute for biological filtration. Using fellow mammals to help us in the task will save lives and avoid the inefficient machines as well as the pathologies associated with their poor filtration.
July 2nd, 2008 at 1:27 am
these theories appear to be absolute garbage to me….definitely the second one.
July 2nd, 2008 at 1:32 am
Now now Vajorie, come in from real world. I am sorry, she gets out of her room every now and again and spacks out on the family PC.
If you see here again let me know, she really is a naughty little retard.
July 2nd, 2008 at 1:44 am
It’s an interesting, albeit a bit disturbing, idea. It seems to me that it would just be another way we exploit “lesser” creatures.
July 2nd, 2008 at 1:46 am
this is sickening….
not even close to being interesting.
July 2nd, 2008 at 3:17 am
End plant cruelty! Plants feel pain! Stop eating vegetables!
Call it gross and inhuman when you have a sick child. Until then, go back to your drum circle and shut up.
July 2nd, 2008 at 3:22 am
this is horrifying and wrong. so the only way we can keep a retired greyhound alive is by making it suffer for us? i beg to differ. what a bunch of sickos.
July 2nd, 2008 at 4:10 am
you guys know this isn’t actually happening right? And that this is not a science proposal but an art project - something to prompt thought or emotional responses?
July 2nd, 2008 at 4:15 am
Can’t the greyhounds be put to another more humane use? I’d be okay if this was one hour a day. Some other service dog routine and sometime off to go stretch.
Kill dogs after life at the race track? Thats insane. Try that with the street dogs in India… the local people will beat up the dog-catchers. Its a friendly live and let live existence.
July 2nd, 2008 at 4:20 am
couldnt you just have a regular machine, and then own a dog that could keep you company.. maybe not, but i think that’s a lot simpler.
July 2nd, 2008 at 4:51 am
Fucking disturbing.
July 2nd, 2008 at 5:04 am
I understood how the greyhound was a mutalistic relationship (dog doesn’t get shot, person can breathe and it seems like no surgery is required on part of the dog). The sheep’s relationship was more of a symbiotic one, in favor of man. There are a few questions I would like to ask the people who thought of the sheep: Sure, that sheep would usually go into a steak, but are you really going to have a sheep as a dialysis machine? Would that put any kind of strain on the sheep’s kidney (I really don’t know. Answers would be nice)? Don’t sheep need a lot of grass to eat as well, more than just a garden? How about blood rejection? Its not even different blood types here, its different species sharing blood (sure you could genetically design a sheep to share blood with a human, but that opens a whole new can of worms and kind of defeats the purpose).
Summary: if you have breathing issues, buy a greyhound.
July 2nd, 2008 at 5:16 am
You all should read before you post. It’s not real. There is no sheep dialysis machine, no greyhound, no spoon.
Calm down.
July 2nd, 2008 at 5:28 am
It’s interesting. It got people thinking (or, attempting to think?) The comments are interesting. Especially that one guy thinks that the dog is cool, but the sheep sadistic?
And it’s interesting that people see things like this, and immediately jump to how sickening it is, while they don’t even know what the animals that they are eating for dinner are going through before they are slaughtered.
July 2nd, 2008 at 5:29 am
It must me nice to look down from your pedestals and condemn everyone else. Not every one has access to the same medical technology as you do so why would you impede research to stop them from having a better quality of life?
July 2nd, 2008 at 5:46 am
I actually quite like this idea. Admittedly in our current mindset it is a bit off putting, however as the article points our it is a rather touching bit of mutual symbiosis that many humans could do well to learn.
July 2nd, 2008 at 6:18 am
Is everyone here completely ignorant? Most medicines in the medical field as it has existed for many decades would have never been developed if it wasn’t for animal testing.
If anything, this is a much better way to treat an animal than make them undergo certain death through medicinal breakthroughs, additionally to the fact that a relationship established on symbiosis, as in these two examples, is a beautiful phenomena that happens all the time in nature.
Why wouldn’t we as the only civilized, imaginative, creative and thinking species use this at our advantage, and at the same time give a loving home to an animal?
July 2nd, 2008 at 6:40 am
i am an artist and i can understand completely the ideas presented behind these photographs. neither one of the animals are in any present danger, and it appears that the artist took full concern with making sure that the mock “machinery” would not harm them in any way.
i definitely think that, would the technology become available, these ideas should be studied more.
i am wondering why everyone feels that these ideas are “sick”, “twisted” or “inhumane”. the animals haven’t been harmed in any way, they are still free to do what they wish, and this is a much better fate than what the greyhound or the sheep would face otherwise.
all of you must remember - if the sheep weren’t caring for its human, then it would be kept in a steel pen, with hard, concrete floors, eating only synthetic foods, and then manhandled, bruised, battered, and cut during its sheering. that is, IF it’s not put on the dinner-table first.
the grey-hound would have spent its retirement DEAD. grey-hounds are not given the luxury of spending the rest of their lives with families that love and care for them - they are usually inhumanely euthenized once they are of no use to their owners.
but the artist has conceptualized a very wonderful fate for both of them. the greyhound is allowed to run and chase a fake rabbit, and in-turn, is helping its owner breath. the sheep is allowed to roam in a garden, eat, sleep, be merry - and is helping its human’s body process its blood. a truly beautiful and symbiotic relationship.
i respect that some people would find the initial idea shocking, but under close scrutiny the concepts are, in fact, quite beautiful.
July 2nd, 2008 at 12:13 pm
f******g sick which w****r decided to do this
July 2nd, 2008 at 9:29 pm
This is awesome. FINALLY a use for those worn out old animals.
“See my vest? Made from real gorilla chest. Like my loafers? Former gophers..”
July 3rd, 2008 at 2:04 am
and since it’s art it really has done its purpose, right? it’s definitely getting a reaction!
July 3rd, 2008 at 2:30 am
The sheep one’s actually not out of the realms of possibility. A sheep’s kidney minus the sheep has been used to do exactly this - there were clinical trials where a person’s blood would be cleaned by a sheep’s kidney by their bed until they could get a kidney transplant. Blood went out through their leg and back in through the jugular.
While the idea of using a sheep like this is understandably ghoulish, if you look at it logically it’s much better than killing the sheep and then using the kidney, presuming the sheep’s quality of life was decent.
July 3rd, 2008 at 5:28 am
nice concept.
July 3rd, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Hey, when you look at the amount of pure inhumane cruelty that is heaped on the “industrial” uses of animals now, this looks like a wonderful idea to me. Think about where that next Big Mac came from, or the neat, plastic wrapped chicken at the market. Millions of animals reared just to be slaughtered? This concept does not kill any animals, and when you check the cost of fuel–which is also used to run power plants, we’re going to have to come up with alternatives soon. Dogs are used to see, help the parylized, pull a wheelchair; this is a wonderful symbiotic relationship, that would extend a HUMAN life. Put that lazy mutt to work, he watches too much TV anyway! But, why not just connect the respirator directly to the treadmill?
July 3rd, 2008 at 8:21 pm
you bitches waste a lot of breath on this. some of you have too much to say for you own good. I ask why does anybody let them comment?
July 3rd, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Cruel… but useful in apocalyptic times
July 7th, 2008 at 6:57 am
if the sheep kidneys work sooo good, why not put them in the patient in the first place. why am i going to leave an organ that is compatible with my blood to a f´’ín lamb?
July 7th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
I hope the only purpose of this post is to provoke, in which it succeeds.
June 25th, 2009 at 2:52 am
You sick twisted mother fuckers.Torturing an amimal like this is rude.Now, the scumbags performing this probably think this isnt torture. If laughing and pointing an a prisoners small cock in gitmo is torture, then this definately is. I love animals and would rather see it humanely put down than subjected to medical procedures. Theres plenty of prisoners and terrorists and child molesters to experiment on