As medical technology improves, humans are living progressively longer lives. This comes with numerous upsides, as well as some problems, one of which is that our organs begin to fail us. According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information (2013), there were 3,525 patients waiting for an organ transplant in 2012, 163 of whom died while on that list. Unfortunately, the supply of human organ donations for allotropic transplants is not able to keep up as the demand becomes increasingly larger.
Clearly we need an alternative solution in order to fill the growing organ gap.
A possible solution has been to turn to non-human animals as organ sources. This alternative is not without ethical dilemmas, from both a human and non-human perspective.