Laika - Controversy

Controversy

Due to the overshadowing issue of the Soviet vs. US Space Race, the ethical issues raised by this experiment went largely unaddressed for some time. As newspaper clippings from 1957 show, the press was focused on reporting the political perspective, while the health and retrieval—or lack thereof—of Laika was hardly mentioned. Only later were there discussions regarding the fate of the dog—which some initially insisted be called Curly rather than Laika.

Sputnik 2 was not designed to be retrievable, and Laika had always been intended to die. The mission sparked a debate across the globe on the mistreatment of animals and animal testing in general to advance science. In the United Kingdom, the National Canine Defence League called on all dog owners to observe a minute's silence, while the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) received protests even before Radio Moscow had finished announcing the launch. Animal rights groups at the time called on members of the public to protest at Soviet embassies. Others demonstrated outside the United Nations in New York; nevertheless, laboratory researchers in the U.S. offered some support for the Soviets, at least before the news of Laika's death.

In the Soviet Union, there was less controversy. Neither the media, books in the following years, nor the public openly questioned the decision to send a dog into space. It was not until 1998, after the collapse of the Soviet regime, that Oleg Gazenko, one of the scientists responsible for sending Laika into space, expressed regret for allowing her to die:

Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I'm sorry about it. We shouldn't have done it... We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog.

Laika is memorialized in the form of a statue and plaque at Star City, Russia, the Russian Cosmonaut training facility. Future space missions carrying dogs would be designed to be recovered. The only other dogs to die in a Soviet space mission were Pchyolka and Mushka, who died when Korabl-Sputnik 3 accidentally disintegrated on re-entry on December 1, 1960.