Heartland Regional Medical Center Ends Cruel Cat Labs, Purchases Manikins

October 2009

After PETA’s Laboratory Investigations Division learned that cats were having hard plastic tubes repeatedly forced down their throats in cruel intubation training exercises at Heartland Regional Medical Center (HRMC) in St. Joseph, Missouri, we sent a letter to the director of the course detailing how animals suffer in these procedures and explaining that modern non-animal simulation methods are educationally superior. We filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and asked our members and supporters to contact the hospital and encourage its administrators to end the use of cats for these training sessions. HRMC has announced that it has ended the use of cats in its Pediatric Advanced Life Support course and replaced them with state-of-the-art human patient simulators.