In October, UNC's Student Animal Legal Defense Fund hosted a lecture by our director of research advocacy, Ryan Merkley, who presented arguments in favor of human-relevant training methods. Last month, our local physician advocate, Roberta Gray, M.D., submitted public comments to the UNC Board of Governors, urging her alma mater to modernize their emergency medicine residency program so that it would meet the standard of excellence for which the university is known. Meanwhile, students and local activists rallied in support of our efforts by distributing outreach materials and educating the general public about UNC's animal lab.
And finally, last week, the school contacted us to relay that the animal lab would be ending and that the school would only be using human-relevant methods to train emergency medicine residents!
We could not have achieved this without your support. More than 42,000 petitions were sent to top officials at UNC from our members across the United States and around the world! Now, UNC joins the vast majority of its peers by embracing medical simulation as the superior training method.
Please join us in thanking UNC for making the switch to ethically and educationally superior training methods. And let's keep the momentum going! Once you sign the UNC thank you message, you will be directed to a Vanderbilt University petition—please urge Vanderbilt to follow suit and end its animal training lab.
Simulation Replaces Live Animal Use in Paramedic Training
Roadmap to End Three Lethal Animal Tests
A Physicians Committee workshop at the National Institutes of Health identified the steps needed to replace Lethal Dose 50 chemical tests—which kill tens of thousands of animals each year—with human-relevant tests. Steps >
