Save Little Friends

Considered a top-tier institution of higher learning among many people, the University of Michigan ranks at the bottom when it comes to animal welfare because of the school's abuse of cats and pigs in its Survival Flight course for nurses. During intubation training for this course, cats have hard plastic tubes repeatedly forced down their windpipes and are frequently killed after the procedure. Pigs have holes cut into their limbs, throats, and chests and have needles stabbed into their bones and hearts for trauma training exercises before they are killed.

While this information is quite disturbing, the biggest shocker is that the University of Michigan already uses state-of-the-art human-patient simulators to teach the same skills in other courses for nurses and physicians! In addition, the national organization representing flight nurses endorses the use of simulators for this training.

The University of Michigan is not the only university where animals continue to be tormented even though superior alternatives are readily available. At the Medical University of South Carolina, pigs have holes cut into their throats and chests in cruel and deadly trauma training exercises, even though the university uses a state-of-the-art non-animal simulator to teach the very same skills in its Advanced Trauma Life Support course.

Like the University of Michigan, St. Louis Children's Hospital continues to use cats and ferrets for intubation training exercises in its Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS) course—even though effective lifelike human manikins are used in nearly every PALS course in the country and the course's sponsor has stated that it does not approve the use of animals. During the exercises, plastic tubes are repeatedly forced down the animals' windpipes,which can cause bleeding, swelling, pain, scarring, collapsed lungs, and even death.

Source : http://www.peta.org/