Cyber Jesus, with most experiments you start on "lesser" animals, just like today where most medicines are tested on animals before going near human trials. In this case it was the soviets and the soviets were like rats are for capitalistic pigs, we test on dogs! First test cutting off dogs head and see if you can make it come back to life, second test would be seeing if it is possible to interconnect the dog with a machine and create a cybernetic being. You HAVE to do both steps with animals before humans as having the first step done with an animal successful and then going straight to human testing on a cybernetic being would be extremely fatal to the first test subjects.
On a side note, I love reading about the experiments both sides tried doing during the cold war, a lot of very creative thinking took place then.
