Hearts

I read in the news that on this day forty years ago, i.e. in 1967, South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the first successful human heart transplant. This must be a great thing to commemorate for humans. It did not say when the first successful heart transplant was made on a dog, though. I looked into the matter and found out that the first succcessful heart transplant on a dog was made as early as in 1960. This is half a dog's lifetime before the same feat was performed on a human. Some would say that the humans only used dogs for practice. I, however, prefer to see it as proof that humans are concerned with developing dog surgery too, because they care so much about us. This is a better interpretation of history, I believe.