On this blog I've written about vegetarianism and animal testing. Another area of animal torture is in medical school labs. I've followed this issue for years and even written letters to about eight med schools encouraging their programs to go to alternatives. Now feast your eyes on the following article in today's New York Times. This came about after years of hard work by animal rights advocates. It gives me hope.
January 1, 2008
Killing Dogs in Training of Doctors Is to End
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
By next month, all American medical schools will have abandoned a time-honored method of teaching cardiology: operating on dogs to examine their beating hearts, and disposing of them after the lesson.
Case Western Reserve School of Medicine was the last to use the method, but the dean, Dr. Pamela Davis, said it would no longer do so after this month.
On Nov. 19, New York Medical College in Valhalla joined New York’s 11 other medical schools and announced that it would close its dog laboratory.
Among the 126 American medical schools, 11 still sacrifice animals for teaching, according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, an advocacy group that tracks the practice. Other than Case, none of them use dogs.
Francis Belloni, a dean at New York Medical College, said his students now used echocardiograms to study heart function, and the subjects were live medical students rather than live dogs. Dr. Belloni said the use of animals was not done lightly and had value, but added that students would “become just as good doctors without it.”
4 comments:
I hope UGA finds a way some day to eliminate their terminal dog labs as well (something I'm going to have to participate in next semester). I can see the value in using live animals for training (much more realistic than dead ones), but I am sick over the fact that I'll have a nice, healthy, young dog come in for surgery and a dead dog going out. The rationale is that I am but a novice surgeon and that waking the dog up from intestinal surgery would be cruel (which I don't really disagree with), but I still question whether it's worth doing. As a student who knows very little about surgery, I'm just not qualified to determine the answer to that...my surgery professor thinks it's worthwhile, but it also might have something to do with the fact that she learned surgery that way and hasn't tried to come up with an alternative.
Alternatives are hard, though. I mean, can a computer or a model really provide the same experience as a living, breathing, bleeding animal? I mean, I'm learning how to tie off blood vessels that have blood pumping through them...how am I supposed to do that with a cadaver? And, where did the cadaver come from? It's almost impossible to have, say, 30 fresh cadavers for us vet students to practice on at the scheduled time. I mean, it is basically impossible to have 30 owners donate their recently naturally-dead dogs to us on the exact date that we need them. Preservation and/or freezing makes the tissues different and not as applicable to simulating real surgery.
Anyway, you know I've spent my life trying not to be the cause of untimely death of animals and plan to continue to be so...however, it's a big dilemma for us vet students. We could do only spays and neuters and then wake the animals up, but would we be prepared for other surgeries? Perhaps...I don't know right now.
I'm glad the med schools are figuring our new ways to study physiology without killing dogs. Maybe we'll follow in their path...many vet schools have already eliminated those labs as well.
-Shirin
I think there is a time and place for "using" animals. Teaching a vet student how to save animals' lives or make their lives better is worthy. The trick is making those judgement calls, making ethical and moral decisions to use animals WHEN THERE IS NO OTHER SUITABLE METHOD AVAILABLE. Like you said, there needs to be more effort and research done to find methods that are as good, if not better, than the old ways. There are, now, many new ways to achieve testing results that are actually better than using animals as test tubes, especially when we're looking at practicing human medicine based on animal results. The medicine you'll be practicing is at least species specific.
Couldn't they use cockroaches or gummy worms instead of dogs? ;)
I vote for gummy worms; even cockroaches deserve to be treated humanely. When I kill them I try to do it instantly. Boy, that doesn't sound much like a pacifist vegetarian does it?!? But ya gotta kill dem roaches.
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