It makes no sense to continue wasting both tax dollars and animals’ lives.
When I went to medical school in the 1980s, it was standard practice
to have students cut apart live dogs and other animals as part of
the curriculum to teach them medical skills and concepts. Since
then, these crude and cruel animal labs have been abandoned in
medical schools and advanced surgical courses in favor of realistic
human simulators that are more humane, cost-efficient and effective.
Apparently, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) didn’t get the memo
about this.
According to federal contracts uncovered by taxpayer watchdog White
Coat Waste Project (WCW), for which I serve as a volunteer medical
adviser, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (both under the DOJ) have still been conducting “live
tissue training” (LTT) courses. LTT is a euphemism for inflicting
traumatic, life-threatening injuries on live animals to teach
certain emergency medical procedures.
As DOJ funding panel Chairman Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-PA) and House
Judiciary Committee member Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) astutely wrote in a
letter to the DOJ in 2019, “LTT involves intentionally wounding live
animals—usually stabbing, burning and shooting pigs and goats, and
sometimes even dogs—and then having trainees crudely attempt to
repair the damage… The use of animals for this training is
expensive, obsolete, unnecessary and opposed by most Americans.”
Many of the animals die from these traumatic injuries during the
courses, and even those who survive are killed at the end.
The federal government’s own studies show that human simulators like
the Cut Suit, TraumaMan and TOMManikin that mimic human anatomy—even
replicating bleeding and breathing—are more effective and economical
than these outdated animal labs. Unlike the animals who are
purchased, transported, dismembered, killed and thrown away after
every LTT course, each simulator can train many students and can be
reused time and again.
Even the U.S. Defense Department states in a 2016 report that LTT is
“outdated and cost-prohibitive” and a 2017 report from the Pentagon
says that “live tissue training options are not anatomically
accurate.” An Army-funded study at Yale concluded in 2015, “it is
clear that simulated training costs less than live tissue training.”
And a 2020 U.S. military-funded study concluded that human
simulation is an effective replacement for LTT.
Nearly every civilian trauma training program in the country now
teaches lifesaving skills using simulation, too.
Adding insult to injury, the DOJ has already spent taxpayers’ money
to purchase high-tech trauma simulators, but has continued to waste
$131,793 on recent, completely unnecessary LTT courses anyway. The
DOJ can’t defend this waste and abuse, so instead it tried to keep
the details a secret, and it took a federal lawsuit by White Coat
Waste Project to pry away relevant documents from the agency.
A majority of Americans on both sides of the aisle want change and
support doing away with this outdated practice. A June 2020 national
survey of 1,000 taxpayers by Lincoln Park Strategies found that 63
percent of them—which included 66 percent of Republicans surveyed
and 65 percent of Democrats surveyed—backed the effort to ask the
DOJ to defund LTT.
As a physician, medical educator and animal advocate, I oppose this
senseless waste of tax dollars and animals’ lives. There needs to be
political support from leaders like members of Congress and Attorney
General Merrick Garland to take swift and decisive action to cut
live tissue training from the curriculum.
Stephen R. Kaufman, MD, is a board-certified ophthalmologist and assistant professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He is also a volunteer medical adviser for the nonprofit White Coat Waste Project, which works to end taxpayer-funded animal experiments.