Blogging About Critters Since 2007

Monday, September 12, 2011

Seal Industry Tries to Capitalize on Medical Researchers Conjectures

While I'm not a fan of using animal hearts for transplants, I'm far more sympathetic to that than to simply using their parts for human vanity consumption. But the seal industry doesn't care. They'll exploit anything to try to save their barbaric trade and, if they can use guilt, even better.

Excerpted from the Chronicle-Herald...
Dr. Philippe Pibarot has been studying seal heart valves to see if they might be a better transplant option for humans than those from cows or pigs, believing they may be more durable than the other animal tissue.

The research at Laval University is still in the earliest stages. Pibarot has yet to begin collecting data through testing rodents and he says that a clinical trial in humans is hypothetical at this point - at least a decade of positive results and funding would have to be established first.

Despite that, a Quebec-based seal fur company has begun championing Pibarot's hypothesis, seeing the research as a buoy for Canada's beleaguered seal harvest.

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