Med School Stops Killing Dogs, Kills Pigs Instead
“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.”
Sounds great, right? Well it turns out only one medical school was using dogs:
“Among the 126 American medical schools, 11 still sacrifice animals for teaching, according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine [PCRM], an advocacy group that tracks the practice. Other than Case [Western Reserve School of Medicine], none of them use dogs.”
What the Times doesn’t report is that the school has decided to use pigs instead:
“For this year’s labs the school will use live pigs instead of dogs—despite past declarations by MCW representatives that pigs are poor subjects for this lab.” (source)
According to PCRM, the email addresses for the medical school personnel responsible for this decision are:
Allen Cowley, Jr., Ph.D.: cowley@mcw.edu
T. Michael Bolger: tbolger@mcw.edu
Jean-Francois Liard: jliard@mcw.edu
Perhaps they deserve a thank you note for ceasing to use dogs and some encouragement to stop using pigs?
That’s horrible!