A group that advocates for humane practices in medicine is urging the Medical College of Wisconsin to stop using live dogs in a lab exercise for students, a practice that has ended in all but a handful of medical schools in the country.
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine â€" spurred by two anonymous Medical College students â€" wrote to college administrators and the instructor asking that the practice be stopped as outdated and unethical.
The chairman of the Medical College's department of physiology, Allen Cowley Jr., defended the practice, saying that "we think it provides an educational advantage" for the students.
In a lab exercise to explore the circulatory system that ended this month, 52 dogs were operated on while under anesthesia and then euthanized.
"What they are doing to dogs is such a betrayal," said Larry Hansen, a neuropathologist at the University of California in San Diego, who led the effort to end that university's required dog lab.
"This is an animal we have bred and selected for, for thousands of years, to become our pal, our companion," Hansen said. "They've been bred to be loyal and trusting."
Many medical schools once used live dogs to teach human physiology, pharmacology or surgery, according to the committee. Today, the committee says, the only other medical schools known to use them are Louisiana State University in New Orleans and New York Medical College, a privately funded school in Valhalla, N.Y.
There are 125 medical schools in the United States and Puerto Rico that are accredited by the Association of American Medical Colleges. Of those, 100 â€" including the top medical institutions of Harvard, Yale and Stanford â€" do not use live animals of any species in their medical school training. The status of the practice at six schools could not be confirmed.
Pigs are used at the University of Wisconsin's School of Medicine in Madison, but according to Jon Sender, a medical school spokesman, only three are used to cover three class sections of physiology.
Opposition to using pigs is tempered by the fact that they are bred for slaughter, not human companionship, Hansen said.
Since the 1980s, most universities have abandoned required live animal laboratories in their medical school training. With the increased sophistication in computer and simulation technology, as well as a growing societal distaste for the use of live animals in research, many schools ended these courses and programs entirely.
Schools such as Columbia, the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins teach basic physiological concepts using a combination of textbooks, computer programs and human simulators â€" dummies that are connected to computers and simulate human responses to chemicals and electrical currents.
The Medical College invested $2.5 million in a high-tech clinical training center last year, which includes three human simulators â€" a man, woman and child â€" that can be moved from emergency room to clinic-type settings.
But Cowley and Jean-Francois Liard, a physiology professor and instructor of the human physiology class that includes the dog lab, say simulators are not suitable alternatives to live animals, although they do use simulators in the course.
That's because the dummies do not provide the hands-on experience that a living dog can, Liard said.
Norman Taylor, a third-year medical student at the college, agreed. He and most of his classmates are unlikely to touch a human heart, he said, unless they go into cardiac surgery. But the experience of holding a beating dog heart, feeling it pulse and understanding "the force required to move blood around the body," was invaluable, Taylor said.
John Pippin, a cardiologist based in Dallas and a medical adviser for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, said the college's insistence that touch is required is absurd.
"First of all, these students aren't going to be touching dogs" in clinical settings as physicians, he said. The argument that human simulators do not show varying responses is either misleading or just ignorant.
"Human simulators can be programmed by an instructor to show a variety of responses," Pippin said. "You can program it to be critically ill or stable. To show an allergic response versus a normal response. They can be programmed to respond to 55 different drugs."
The beauty of a simulator, he said, is you can repeat your procedures again and again.
"You can't do that with a dog," Pippin said. "Medical students learn at different rates. Of the five students working on that dog, some will get it and some won't. And those who don't are going to have to do it over and over again. The live dog lab doesn't give them that opportunity."
Completion of the Human Physiology course at the Medical College is required of all first-year medical students. However, attendance is not mandatory, said Liard, the instructor. He does not know, or keep a record of, students who elect not to take the dog lab.
This year, 210 students registered for the course and 192 attended the lab. Groups of four or five students were given one dog to work with during the course of five hours.
The school had extra dogs on hand, in case any of the lab dogs died before the students were able to finish the exercise.
According to the exercise description, published this year, students were given a fully anesthetized animal with a tube down its throat. The students were instructed to shave the dogs' throats, chests and inner legs with electric clippers and hook them up via intravenous probes to computers that enabled them to monitor the dogs' pulse.
The students then opened the animals' chests with scalpels and bone saws, enabling them to see changes in heart function as they inject various chemicals, apply electrical currents and manipulate the heart by hand.
After the heart had been massaged by hand and jolted by electrical paddles, the students injected the dogs with a high dose of potassium, which depolarizes the heart and kills the animal.
Students were instructed to watch the heart's reaction to the potassium and take notes.
The dogs used in the class are generally hounds, or "reject hunting dogs," said Ken Schroeder, the school's dog dealer.
Schroeder is a designated USDA Registered Random Source Class B Animal Dealer, meaning he has permission to deal dogs that he gets from "random" sources, including pounds, flea markets and newspaper ads. He can sell them to research institutions, veterinary schools and, in this case, a medical school.
Schroeder, who is based in Wells, Minn., said he deals only with dogs he has bred or has received from acquaintances. He would not divulge his client list or the price he demands for a dog. He also wouldn't reveal the price he pays to purchase his dogs, though he said sometimes he loses money on them.
The Medical College pays him between $200 and $300 a dog. Running the lab costs the school $18,000 a year.
Asked if Schroeder had ethical qualms about selling the animals for research or other medical purposes, he said, "I do and I don't." And he said that "if PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) gives me a million dollars, I'll stop dealing them."
Robert Faith, the director of the Medical College's Biomedical Resource Center, said he and his staff inspect every dog that Schroeder sells to them.
"We have never seen anything in any of these animals that would lead us to believe they have been mistreated physically or behaviorally," Faith said.
Schroeder has been cited by the USDA 16 times since 1997 for failing to allow inspectors onto his property, records show. Inspectors make routine and unannounced visits several times a year, Schroeder said, and he was on the road when the inspectors arrived but usually present for follow-up visits.
Many of the inspections that were completed revealed sick animals and substandard housing facilities, records show. The problems were not serious enough to result in violations, but Schroeder was told to correct them. According to USDA documents, it appears as though he followed through on all veterinary recommendations.
For the Medical College professors, the bottom line is that they would rather graduate students who have experience with animals before those students operate on humans.
But Rooshin Dalal, an MD/PhD student at the University of Virginia who was instrumental in getting that institution to drop its use of live animals as teaching props, said that argument was ludicrous.
"Practicing one time on a dog is not going to help you save someone's life," he said.
