Written by Heather Faraid Drennan
After more than a year of campaigning by PETA and supporters—and a day after the release of a shocking PETA exposé—the University of Michigan (U-M) announced that it has ended the use of cats in its Survival Flight intubation training laboratory.
More than 100,000 people—including Michigan natives Iggy Pop and Lily Tomlin—called on U-M to replace crude and cruel live-animal laboratories with more humane and effective human simulators, which are already used for other U-M courses. The U-M student group Michigan Animal Rights Society led demonstrations in support of the effort, the student assembly passed a resolution urging the school to end the laboratories, and the student newspaper editorial board came out in favor of replacing animals with simulators. PETA supporters even jammed university circuit boards with phone calls to protest the Survival Flight animal laboratories.
U-M says that it still plans to harm and kill pigs to teach other skills in the Survival Flight training course, and PETA will continue to push the school to replace all animal use with simulators that are already available on campus.
Of course, this victory would not have been possible without the help of our supporters. Help us keep up the momentum by clicking here to urge St. Louis Children's Hospital to join U-M and nearly every other facility in the country by replacing the use of animals with simulators for intubation training.
I love animals, but some of PETAs campaigns are extremely misinformed. Things like this one are ok, but seriously, being completely 100% against animal testing is hypocritical. How many of you would have cancer treatment if you needed it? How many of you take pain medication when you're in pain? How many of you would go on antidepressants if you were suicidal? How many of you expect your doctors to be properly trained and your medications and surgical procedures to be safe and used/performed correctly? If you were exposed to HIV through no fault of your own, how many of you would want to be cured or at least improve your chances of not contracting the disease? I will bet everyone can say yes to at least one of these things....and now also think how this applies to every person you love and care about. Animal testing is the closest thing we have to testing on people, and after rat/animal studies, the next step is human clinical trials. If you are going to refuse all forms of medical treatment for your family than by all means be against animal testing. But otherwise, if you want safe medication and procedures and to cure diseases, it's a fact of life that needs to be accepted. There are more humane ways to test on animals so they are not in pain, and to ensure they are euthenaised humanely as well. But completely stopping animal testing? We might as well shut down all hospitals now.
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