Killing Dogs in Training of Doctors Is to End
From The New York Times
Killing Dogs in Training of Doctors Is to End
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
Published: January 1, 2008
By next month, all American medical schools will have abandoned a time-honored method of teaching cardiology: operating on dogs to examine their beating hearts, and disposing of them after the lesson.
Operating on a dog in 1948 to perfect a technique to be used on human hearts. Fritz Goro/Time Life Pictures, via Getty Images
Case Western Reserve School of Medicine was the last to use the method, but the dean, Dr. Pamela Davis, said it would no longer do so after this month.
On Nov. 19, New York Medical College in Valhalla joined New York’s 11 other medical schools and announced that it would close its dog laboratory.
Among the 126 American medical schools, 11 still sacrifice animals for teaching, according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, an advocacy group that tracks the practice. Other than Case, none of them use dogs.
Francis Belloni, a dean at New York Medical College, said his students now used echocardiograms to study heart function, and the subjects were live medical students rather than live dogs. Dr. Belloni said the use of animals was not done lightly and had value, but added that students would “become just as good doctors without it.”
