PETA members and students delivered a surprise package to University of Michigan (UM) President Mary Sue Coleman's office on Friday. When demonstrators tried to walk into Coleman's office, her staff blocked the door, saying she was not in, but that didn't stop a PETA "cat" and his friends from delivering 100,000 petition signatures against the school's archaic and deadly use of cats and pigs in its Survival Flight training course.
 

 
UM continues to torture cats and pigs, despite the fact that modern human simulators are more effective and are already in use in other courses at UM to teach the same skills. In the Survival Flight course, cats have hard plastic tubes repeatedly forced down their delicate windpipes, and pigs have holes cut into their limbs, throats, and chests and have needles stabbed into their bones and hearts before they are killed. In an opinion piece published in the Detroit News, a trauma surgeon recently explained why the use of simulators is superior to tormenting animals.

Thank you to everyone who signed PETA's petition against these cruel exercises. If you haven't yet, please help us keep the pressure on UM by sending an e-mail to Mary Sue Coleman demanding that the cruel training exercises stop.

Written by Michelle Sherrow

Lily Tomlin is always looking for signs of intelligent life, but she hasn't yet found it in the University of Michigan's (UM) survival flight course. The Detroit native recently wrote to UM to ask its officials to stop allowing cats and pigs to be abused in cruel and deadly flight training exercises and to replace the animals with advanced human patient simulators instead. Human patient simulators are used across the country to train flight nurses, and UM already uses simulators to teach the same skills in other courses.

In a letter to UM President Mary Sue Coleman, Tomlin writes, "Having trainees jam hard tubes down cats' throats, cut holes into pigs' throats and chests, and stab needles into the animals' bones and the tissue surrounding their hearts is simply unjustifiable when modern and superior alternatives are available."

Are you listening, UM? Don't make Lily go all Ernestine on you.

Coleman also received a surprise visit recently from PETA members wearing cat and pig costumes to protest an awards ceremony at which she was being recognized. The animals don't get a break, so why should UM?

Join PETA, Lily Tomlin, Iggy Pop, UM's student government, and others in urging UM to stop killing cats and pigs in crude and cruel training laboratories.

Written by Michelle Sherrow

You guys are so awesome, and here's why: After PETA asked everyone to urge officials at the University of Michigan (UM) to stop tormenting live cats and pigs in cruel and deadly survival flight training exercises (which are completely unnecessary considering that UM already uses superior human-patient simulators to teach the same skills in other classes), you came through.

And how! So many people have been contacting the university that callers to the office of UM President Mary Sue Coleman are greeted with this message:

On behalf of the animals who are still suffering in laboratories, thank you. Keep up the great work—and keep those calls coming!

Written by Jeff Mackey