College Promoted Animal Abuse: Medical College of Wisconsin Dog Labs

For this article, I wanted to find something that would elicit a reaction from readers. In order to do this, I had to make sure it was something that I was very passionate about. I decided to write on the Medical College of Wisconsin's Dog Testing Labs, to fit this bill.

The Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) uses 60, live dogs in a first-year physiology course, which are then killed at the end of the class. There has been talk to replace these dog labs with pigs or sheep, but how the does that change the overall horror? Aren't they still needlessly killing animals? One reason this is an even more heinous crime is that MCW owns four state-of-the-art human patient simulators specifically designed to replace animal use for physiology teaching, so MCW president Michael Bolger could implement humane alternatives immediately. Top schools, such as Harvard and Yale, have been producing excellent doctors for years without the use of live animal murder, so why can't a school like MCW follow their lead, I ask you?

The Journal of the American Medical Association (2006), notes that MCW is the largest U.S. medical school still using these archaic labs and practices. A few other key aspects of this continued animal abuse is also troubling:

1) As stated earlier, MCW already has the state-of-the-art equipment to do this testing using computers and software programs to spare these animals.

2) MCW's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) have been found by inspectors with USDA to have improperly approved the use of dogs for its physiology course.

3) The number of dogs approved by the IACUC was twice the number reported in the submitted protocol.

4) MCW obtains dogs from a Class B random source animal dealer.

5) MCW proposes obtaining dogs by means of pound seizure. Humane and scientific considerations support eliminating the use of animals for medical student teaching at MCW, and the school should immediately replace the use of animals with alternative, non-animal, teaching methods.

Some examples of the non-animal educational alternatives include; lifelike simulation models, computer-based learning methods, and interactive virtual reality programs. There are many educational and medical professionals that are on record supporting the educational, ethical, and economic advantages of these and other non-animal alternatives. One program, the METI Human Patient Simulator (HPS), accurately mirrors human responses to a variety of situations. HPS facilitates repetition, progressive learning, and immediate feedback and correction in safe, but true-to-life scenarios. None of these are available with the mutilation of live animals for learning.

Some of the country's most highly regarded medical schools stopped using animals in their undergraduate curricula more than a decade ago. Even still, these schools continue to be highly ranked year after year, making it clear that the use of non-animal alternatives has not has not impaired the quality of medical education provided by these schools. At a time when the mainstream of American medical education has successfully and advantageously replaced the use of animals, just a few schools, including MCW, adhere to these archaic and inhumane methods.