Here's some exciting news from PETA's home region of Hampton Roads, Virginia: Following more than two years of urging from PETA, the Naval Medical Center Portsmouth (NMCP) has completely replaced its cruel and crude use of ferrets for teaching lifesaving intubation skills to physicians and others with more modern and effective simulators.

Joining PETA in calling for an end to this cruel ferret laboratory were several military and civilian medical experts with firsthand knowledge about the superiority of simulators, including a pediatrician who is a former commander of NMCP. Previously, ferrets had hard plastic tubes forced down their delicate windpipes as often as 10 times per session—a procedure that can cause bleeding, swelling, pain, scarring, collapsed lungs, and even death.

NMCP joins the Naval Medical Center San Diego, Tripler Army Medical Center, William Beaumont Army Medical Center, and Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences—as well as more than 90 percent of pediatric residency programs nationwide—that have already ended the use of cats and ferrets for intubation training in favor of superior human simulators. 

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How You Can Help Animals in Intubation Laboratories

Please help persuade St. Louis Children's Hospital and Washington University in St. Louis to replace painful intubation training exercises on cats and ferrets with humane and superior non-animal methods.

A big "Thank you!" is due to the Gratiot County Board of Commissioners for taking an important step toward ending the betrayal of homeless animals in Michigan.

You may recall that this past winter, the University of Michigan ended a cruel cat laboratory after PETA revealed that the school was purchasing homeless cats from R&R Research, a notorious Class B dealer. PETA also discovered that R&R obtained many of the cats from the Gratiot County, Michigan, animal shelter. Local citizens joined PETA in calling for reform, and the commissioners have now passed a resolution to strictly limit the number of animals that it releases to R&R Research.

He is of one of the cats who ended up at the University of Michigan and was killed

The End of an (Appalling) Era

Gratiot County couldn't completely ban the release of animals to R&R because of a contract that runs through February 2014, but the commissioners voted to release only one animal to R&R in each of the next two years. While it's disappointing that two animals will still fall into R&R's hands, the commissioners are making the best of a bad situation—especially when you consider that, last year, the county animal shelter handed more than 30 animals over to that torture pimp. In addition, the county voted to end the barbaric use of gassing as a method for euthanasia at the shelter.

Mecosta County—the only other county in the state whose shelter was releasing animals for use in experiments—confirmed that starting July 1, its shelter will no longer do so. So when Gratiot County's contract with R&R expires, it will mark the complete end of pound seizure in the state of Michigan.

How You Can Help Animals Exploited by Animal Dealers

Please ask your congressional representatives to prohibit Class B dealers from selling lost, abandoned, and stolen animals to laboratories.

It's time once again for the not-so-coveted Vivisector of the Month award. Of course, all vivisectors deserve the "prize" for their mad science, but we've narrowed the field to two particularly nasty candidates. We're asking you to vote for the person you would most like to see in a stockade getting beaned in the head with fruit.

Mark Lowell is a faculty member at the University of Michigan (UM) who seems to have forgotten that when he went through medical school he swore an oath to do no harm. Lowell directs a Survival Flight course for nurses; in the course, cats and pigs are tormented even though superior human simulators are used to teach the same skills in other courses at UM. Cats have hard tubes repeatedly forced down their windpipes for intubation training, and many of them are killed. Pigs have holes cut into their limbs, throats, and chests and are stabbed with needles in their bones and the tissue surrounding their hearts. PETA, students at UM, the campus newspaper, the student government, and even UM alum Iggy Pop are vigorously urging Lowell to shut down this nasty operation.

In the other corner, weighing in at "cold and callous," is Bradley Greger. This peach of a person is one of the experimenters we've been telling you about at the University of Utah (the U) who buys cats from the North Utah Valley Animal Shelter and subjects them to cruel experiments before killing them. Greger also drills holes into monkeys' and cats' skulls and implants electrodes into their brains. He screws titanium pins into the monkeys' skulls and attaches an aluminum head-restraint device to immobilize the animals in chairs for up to eight hours per day for brain experiments.

You can use our form to e-mail the University of Michigan and the University of Utah and tell them that you support modern, humane science—not cruel animal experiments.

So who will it be: Mark "Lower Than Low" Lowell or Bradley "The Butcher" Greger? Get your moldy oranges ready, aim, and fire.

Written by Michelle Sherrow

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After a healthy amount of prodding from PETA, Heartland Regional Medical Center in St. Joseph, Missouri, has announced that it is planning to stop jamming hard plastic tubes down cats' windpipes for intubation training in its Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS) course. They are making the switch to state-of-the-art manikins by the end of this month.

Back in June, PETA contacted hospital administrators and urged them to replace the cruel use of cats for intubation training. We wanted them to start using the more effective, humane humanlike simulators that are endorsed by the PALS course's sponsor organization and that are used at nearly every PALS facility in the country. Heartland resisted. But after two months, a USDA complaint from PETA, a letter, a phone call from one of the original developers of the PALS course, and thousands of e-mails from caring PETA supporters, Heartland administrators have had a change of heart.

Switching to manikins is purrfect—cats are spared, and nurses, EMTs, and other emergency caregivers get more accurate and effective training.

What's the holdup, St. Louis Children's Hospital?

Written by Alisa Mullins

Animals—from horses to birds as well as those killed for their fur, skin, and flesh—have a friend in Dan Piraro, creator of the wonderfully offbeat internationally syndicated cartoon Bizarro.

Now Dan has stepped up for cats used in excruciating (and scientifically inferior) pediatric intubation training at St. Louis Children's Hospital. Trainees who are enrolled in the Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS) course at the facility repeatedly force plastic tubes down cats' windpipes. This painful procedure often causes bleeding and swelling in the tissues of the cats' throats and can also lead to scarring, collapsed lungs, and even death! Manikins and advanced simulators have proved superior to the use of animals for intubation training, and the sponsor of the PALS course, the American Heart Association (AHA), exclusively recommends the use of these humane methods—not animals—for this training. The AHA has also distanced itself from the few facilities such as St. Louis Children's Hospital that continue to use animals in PALS.

Dan, a former student at Washington University in St. Louis (which offers the PALS course in conjunction with St. Louis Children's Hospital), has fired off a letter to the editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, writing, "It doesn't take a medical degree to recognize that practicing intubation on a limp cat is nothing like doing the same procedure on a larger, crying, squirming and/or coughing human child." And to make that point even clearer, he included this cartoon:

Click for a larger version

Definitely worth a thousand words! But you don't have to be an artist to tell St. Louis Children's Hospital that "first, do no harm" should include our feline friends—all you have to do is click here.

Written by Jeff Mackey