With this change, Vanderbilt joins the 278 other emergency medicine residency programs in the U.S. and Canada that exclusively use human-relevant training methods.
Many of you are familiar with our efforts to end Vanderbilt University’s
use of live animals—including sheep, goats, and pigs—for training its
emergency medicine residents. The animals were used to perform invasive
procedures and then killed if they survived the training session. But no
more! We recently confirmed that the emergency medicine program at
Vanderbilt is now animal-free! We couldn’t have done this without you.
After first attempting to communicate with program leadership in 2013 to
offer research and data supporting nonanimal training methods, we launched a
public campaign the following year by filing a federal complaint. Over the
years, we placed several billboards and newspaper and bus ads in the area,
held physician-led demonstrations, and tabled in Nashville to spread the
word, and local residents ran a grassroots campaign. We even delivered
129,466 of your petitions to Vanderbilt officials, personally stacking boxes
in the dean’s office!
The chair of Vanderbilt’s Department of Emergency Medicine has confirmed
that the program now employs “entirely nonanimal curricula.” With this
change, Vanderbilt joins the 278 other emergency medicine residency programs
in the U.S. and Canada that exclusively use human-relevant training methods,
such as human-patient simulators, cadavers, and partial task trainers.
We achieved this victory by working together! We now have eight more
programs to go! And with your help, we’ll get there. Thank you for all you
do to support our efforts.
Return to Alternatives to Animal Testing, Experimentation and Dissection