Vanderbilt's Emergency Medical Training Program Ends Animal Labs
Alternatives to Animal Testing, Experimentation and Dissection - An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM Physicians Committee
February 2021

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.

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