While eating a quick lunch in the CEREMADE common room, I came across an older Nature paper of 3 Feb 2022 on the Dog Aging Project, a longitudinal study of domestic dogs. Describing the goal and design of the project rather than its yet to come findings. The population is made of self-nominated (US) dog owners, with what seems to me like an overkill of precautions about data gathering. (On a totally personal basis, I always find puzzling the amount of money and efforts spent on pets when humans are overwhelmingly struggling to achieve decent living conditions. Plus, pets consume up to a fifth of the world’s meat and fish. And kill 25 million birds a year in the UK only.)
“Veterinary and animal ethical concerns about using pets as research subjects include non-uniform oversight protections and the need to respect research subjects who cannot consent to participation (…) The general approach we take to dog owner informed consent for their dog participation is modelled after informed consent used for human subjects research.”
