Not long before Laika was flown to Baikonur for launch, Vladimir Yazdovsky took her to his Moscow home to play with his children, because before he was a scientist, or a Soviet, or even a Russian, he was a human being. And human beings are inseparable from dogs. “Laika was a wonderful dog… quiet and very placid,” Yazdovsky writes in his memoirs. “Before her flight, I brought Laika home and showed her to the kids. They were fascinated by her behavior and her beauty. They played with her and pet her. I wanted to do something nice for the dog since she didn’t have much longer to live.”
It was early in winter, and the Moscow night would have been cold with temperatures near freezing. At two years old, Laika was still a young dog, and if she was quiet and placid, she may have entered the house with a slight hesitation mixed with the excitement of seeing so many new people, young people, moreover, the children filled with energy and excitement themselves. What did Laika do during her time in Yazdovsky’s home? How long did she stay? Did the children beg for her to sleep in their rooms? We simply do not know.
Among the stories told about the space dogs of the Soviet program, this is one of the most important. It speaks to Yazdovsky’s humanity, and to the humanity of the entire Soviet team. It tells us that these scientists and engineers cared deeply about these dogs—they loved them—and treated them as friends and colleagues, as working dogs. It tells us that they felt not guilt, I think, but empathy for Laika and her mission. Laika was to be sacrificed, and while I found no record of anyone on the team in real opposition to that sacrifice, there is plenty of evidence that the people who sent her into space did so with a heavy heart.
Yazdovsky was in a leadership position, and he had great authority over the dogs’ training and care. And yet the dogs did not belong to him, and they did not belong to his superior, Korolev. Beyond the fact that the space dogs belonged to themselves (but this is another kind of truth), they belonged to the Soviet Union, to the mission that was the Soviet Union, and now, I think, these many years later, they belong to all of us. If Yazdovsky was able to take Laika home with him, it was a great feat indeed. The Soviet rocket and missile program was as secret as it was successful, and to remove from the kennels the one dog that had been so carefully trained for this historic flight would have been risky and in defiance of regulations. Yet the story persists, substantiated by Yazdovsky himself. When I related the story to Sergei Khrushchev, he admitted he had not heard it before. I asked if he thought it were true. “Taking the dog home?” Khrushchev said. “I don’t think this was possible. How you receive permission to do it? It isn’t reasonable. But then again,” he said, taking a long breath, “it’s Russia. And everything can happen in Russia.”
The space dogs of Soviet Russia were not lab animals, I think. They were cosmonauts, highly trained working dogs with a job to do. While their work was dangerous, and some of them died doing it, so is the work of war dogs, police dogs, search-and-rescue dogs, herding dogs. A dog does not choose its work, but rather it is bred and trained to perform the work it does, the work we need it to do. And work, as the original agreement between humankind and dogs, is the underpinning of the bond we form with them.
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.