Sure. So you could maybe add the first animals to safely return from space into the list too - the first win on the American side if you're counting sub-orbital flights, otherwise it'd've been Sputnik 5.

That was part of the mission profile, no? If it hadn’t been you’d have a point, but as I understand it that was a reasonable milestone to hit and to determine if an animal can even survive for a time in orbit before they risked a human life.

Animals often die in experimentation and that’s usually the whole point of the experiment.