Kurt Caswell - Laika's Window

Both dog and trainer (or handler) are changed by the experience of training and come naturally into a relationship based on trust. In her beautiful book, Adam’s Task , Vicki Hearne writes, “The better trained a dog is—which is to say, the greater his ‘vocabulary’—the more mutual trust there is, the more dog and human can rely on each other to behave responsibly.” The vocabulary resident in the training adds up to a language too, a language that adds up to a story by which the dog and its human trainer may communicate. Communicating with a dog, or talking with a dog, writes Hearne, “entails care and caretaking. That is part of what respecting one another means.” The dog and its trainer, she writes, “having learned to talk, are now in the presence of and are commanded by love.” This kind of love between a dog and its trainer is different than that between a dog and a pet owner. A pet owner is but shallowly invested in talking to the dog, and often this conversation remains on the surface of what the dog needs (food, a walk) and what the pet owner needs (comfort, companionship). In many cases it is the dog that commands the pet owner, and the pet owner obeys with the hope of receiving love. “Trainers like to say that you haven’t any idea what it is to love a dog until you’ve trained one,” Hearne writes. The trainer commands by love, and the dog obeys by love, but “the ability to exact obedience doesn’t give you the right to do so,” writes Hearne, “it is the willingness to obey that confers the right to command.”

In an interview in Space Dogs , engineer Vladimir Tsvetov, who worked on life-support systems, spoke about the space dogs’ willingness to obey. “What did they feel?” he asks. “It’s hard to say, but these dogs were real professionals. They submitted themselves to training, and perhaps when the sensors were fitted on them, they understood something serious was going on.” Oleg Gazenko agrees: “No one working on the experiments involving animals saw them as just dogs,” he said in Space Dogs . “We saw them, rather, as our colleagues, as friends. It was amazing how, even during the sometimes painful procedures, when some medicine had to be injected, or some hair had to be removed so we could attach the sensors, the dogs never took it as an act of aggression or unfriendliness. On the contrary, they would turn and give you a lick on the cheek.”

It is unhelpful, I think, to regard the space dogs as victims, nor can we think of them as choosing their life among the stars. So what are we left with, when it is so painful to imagine these dogs enduring the stresses of training and then of spaceflight, and some of them dying upon impact with the Earth, or dying in a fiery explosion, and some of them dying in space? We are left with an emptiness that arrives with the fullness and necessity of human endeavor in which dogs, and other animals too, are our companions, our subjects, and sometimes our sacrifices. We love them, and we sacrifice them anyway.

I support the rights of animals to live as they evolved to live, and all animals live in relationship with other animals, humans included. A distinction may be made here between working animals that are bred and trained to work, want to work, even need to work, and animal research, the use of animals for experimentation in scientific laboratories. Much of the opposition centers on animal research, as opposed to using animals for work, but both are unsolvable problems, even as the universe, it seems, allows for such problems. Not every thesis has an antithesis. I do not here wish to take up a position for or against animal research but rather to acknowledge that humankind has benefited greatly from this relationship, including those people who profess to be intolerant, who work toward a world in which no animal is harmed by another. Those people have benefited too.

In Billions and Billions , famed astronomer Carl Sagan writes about his struggle with myelodysplasia, a disease of the bone marrow. After his diagnosis, his doctors told him he did not have long to live unless he underwent a bone marrow transplant. Sagan struggled with the fact that animal research is responsible for the development of this procedure. “In my writings, I have tried to show how closely related we are to other animals,” writes Sagan, “how cruel it is to inflict pain on them, and how morally bankrupt it is to slaughter them to, say, manufacture lipstick. But still, as Dr. [E. Donnell] Thomas put it in his Nobel Prize lecture, ‘The marrow grafting could not have reached clinical application without animal research, first in in-bred rodents and then in out-bred species, particularly the dog.’” The disease eventually took Sagan’s life, and to the end he remained deeply conflicted by benefiting from treatments that relied on animal research. For him, as for many of us, it is an unsolvable problem.

The space dogs flew in the days before the standardization of laws governing the care and treatment of animals, and yet in my research I only found evidence that the team under Korolev and Yazdovsky exemplified what we today hold as the code of the animal researcher:

Refine—research with as little pain and trauma as possible

Reduce—limit the frequency and numbers of animals used in research

Replace—remove the need for animals in research by finding other options

In remarks he made in 2005, the Dalai Lama offered his position regarding animal research, echoing the code of the animal researcher: “I encourage the minimum use of experiments on animals, the absolute minimum amount of pain. Only perform highly necessary experiments, and as little pain as possible. If it must be done, [if that is your path, it is compassionate] to kill out of necessity, but only with empathy. Hold in you the sense of the compassionate: ‘I [acknowledge] that I exploit this animal to bring greater benefit to a great number of sentient beings.’ You must feel the sacrifice, in your heart. It is never made lightly.”

Yazdovsky, Gazenko, and Abram Genin (the man who would later strap his watch to Chernuska), along with the three dogs—Laika, Albina, and Mukha—boarded a Tupolev TU-104 to fly to Tashkent, and from there on to Baikonur on a smaller Ilyushin-14 prop plane for the launch of Sputnik II . The Tupolev TU-104 was a Russian turbojet aircraft with twin engines, one of the first turbojets in operation in the world. It was too big, really, to land on the short runway at Tashkent. It would land at Tashkent, but not without causing Korolev a great deal of worry and stress. And his worry was justified, as on that single plane flew the entire team that was to make Sputnik II possible. If it crashed, a great deal would be lost, maybe everything. Korolev spoke to the pilot before the flight: remember , he said, you are transporting the haut monde of Soviet science and engineering. You must bring them in safely .

At Baikonur, the team was making final preparations, still racing the clock to launch Sputnik II in time to celebrate the Revolution on November 7. For days now, Radio Moscow and the Soviet press had been updating the country about the location of Sputnik I on its journey around the Earth. Everywhere in its path, people watched the skies, hoping to see it pass overhead, and listened to radio broadcasts to hear that haunting sound: “beep, beep, beep, beep.” The press also spoke of a satellite nearing completion, a new satellite that would be even more spectacular than the first because it would be carrying a live animal into space. On October 27, before coming to Baikonur, Laika was “interviewed” on Radio Moscow and, as if on cue, she barked.