PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Jarrod Bailey AU - Shiranee Pereira TI - Advances in neuroscience imply that harmful experiments in dogs are unethical AID - 10.1136/medethics-2016-103630 DP - 2017 Jul 22 TA - Journal of Medical Ethics PG - medethics-2016-103630 4099 - http://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2017/07/23/medethics-2016-103630.short 4100 - http://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2017/07/23/medethics-2016-103630.full AB - Functional MRI (fMRI) of fully awake and unrestrained dog 'volunteers' has been proven an effective tool to understand the neural circuitry and functioning of the canine brain. Although every dog owner would vouch that dogs are perceptive, cognitive, intuitive and capable of positive emotions/empathy, as indeed substantiated by ethological studies for some time, neurological investigations now corroborate this. These studies show that there exists a striking similarity between dogs and humans in the functioning of the caudate nucleus (associated with pleasure and emotion), and dogs experience positive emotions, empathic-like responses and demonstrate human bonding which, some scientists claim, may be at least comparable with human children. There exists an area analogous to the 'voice area' in the canine brain, enabling dogs to comprehend and respond to emotional cues/valence in human voices, and evidence of a region in the temporal cortex of dogs involved in the processing of faces, as also observed in humans and monkeys. We therefore contend that using dogs in invasive and/or harmful research, and toxicity testing, cannot be ethically justifiable.