An animal-rights group has filed a complaint with the National Institutes of Health about Ohio State University’s purchase of 15 dogs for a research project.

The dogs were part of an OSU study conducted by researchers in the College of Pharmacy and the Davis Heart and Lung Research Institute. The experiments involved implanting pacemakers in some dogs; other dogs served as controls.

The researchers forced changes in the dogs’ heart rates. In some cases, they forced the dogs’ hearts to fail. The goal was to learn more about atrial fibrillation, an irregular, generally rapid heart rate that can cause poor blood flow in the body.

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Ohio State bought the dogs a few months before a rule change by the National Institutes of Health that had been announced three years earlier and would have prohibited the purchase of the dogs. The researchers received nearly $3 million from the NIH for the study. The agency announced in 2011 that, starting on Oct. 1, 2014, it would no longer allow the use of its grants to buy or experiment on animals purchased through what are known as Class B dealers.

Class B dealers get animals — mostly dogs and cats — from random sources, including animal shelters and Craigslist ads. The rules now state that NIH-funded researchers have to buy animals from Class A dealers, who breed animals specifically for laboratory experiments.

Class B dogs generally run about $100. Class A dogs cost $1,000 or more.

Janet Weisenberger, senior associate vice president for the office of research at Ohio State, said Class B dogs usually are more genetically diverse than dogs that come from the same breeder, which could be advantageous for research.

“The other issue, of course, is that the cost is lower,” she said.

Purchase orders obtained by the Beagle Freedom Project, the group that filed the complaint, show that Ohio State bought dogs from a Class B dealer based in Madison County a few months before the rules took effect in 2014. Some of those dogs were delivered after the Oct. 1 deadline, and experiments on the dogs also were performed after that deadline.

“It seems like they’re really trying to stretch this definition to create a loophole here, especially when they’ve been on notice since 2011 that the NIH was instituting this policy,” Jeremy Beckham, a research specialist and campaign coordinator with the Beagle Freedom Project, said of Ohio State.

The group filed a complaint with the federal agency on Aug. 10 after a public-records request campaign yielded records that detailed the timeline. NIH officials would not say whether the agency is investigating Ohio State.

In an email to Beckham, however, the director of the NIH office of science policy, engagement, education and communication said that the complaint had been forwarded to the NIH office of laboratory-animal welfare, which reviews such charges.

Jeffrey Grabmeier, an OSU spokesman, said the university did nothing wrong, because it signed purchase contracts for dogs before the NIH deadline.

“The key part is that they were bought with the funds that were appropriated earlier than that,” he said. “As long as you purchase them with funds that were allocated before Oct. 1, you’re within the NIH guidelines.”

Grabmeier said university veterinarians visited the Class B dealer in Madison County and were satisfied with the operation. The university did not require the dealer to document where the dogs came from.

Weisenberger said that the researchers hope to develop a drug that could replace pacemakers, which often are unreliable.

The university would not make the researchers available for interviews and asked that their names not be published, for fear of backlash from animal-rights groups.

The researchers chose dogs for their experiments because, after primates, dogs’ hearts are most similar to humans’ hearts. The university chose not to test on primates because they are expensive, and because primate testing has become less socially accepted, Weisenberger said.

“From an ethical perspective, we try to limit the studies that we do in primates.”

Grabmeier said the number of animals used for research overall has dropped about 80 percent since 2000.

Most of the animals in OSU labs are mice, he said. In all, Ohio State has 49,363 animals for laboratory experiments, Grabmeier said in an email. Of those, 25 are dogs, cats or primates. About 100 are farm animals. The rest are mice, rats and other rodents such as guinea pigs.

Weisenberger said the dog research is necessary.

“We all know people who suffer from heart disease,” she said. “I would be hypocritical if I wasn’t supportive of work with animals that led to breakthroughs for humans.”

larenschield@dispatch.com

@larenschield