Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) ends the use of cat labs

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Please take a moment to write to officials at the National Institutes of Health and ask them to end cruel brain experiments on cats at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Following an extensive PETA campaign, Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) confirmed that it has ended the use of cats in painful and crude intubation training drills and is joining the hundreds of other facilities across the country that teach people to save babies’ lives by exclusively using sophisticated lifelike simulators.

The change in WUSTL’s program comes just six weeks after PETA released undercover video footage of cats having hard tubes forced down their throats in the school’s Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS) course, offered in conjunction with St. Louis Children’s Hospital. WUSTL was the last facility in the country that PETA knows of that was still using animals for the PALS course.

Following PETA’s recent exposé, TV icon and Missouri native Bob Barker wrote to WUSTL to offer to purchase $75,000 in simulation equipment if the school would end the cruel use of cats. PETA also filed a complaint with the Missouri attorney general alleging that misleading claims that the school made on its website in defense of the course violated consumer-protection laws.

PETA’s campaign to urge WUSTL to end its use of cats began in 2008 and has included protests, pleas from medical experts, ad campaigns, and tens of thousands of e-mails and phone calls from PETA supporters.

WUSTL joins Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, Naval Medical Center San Diego, Naval Medical Center Portsmouth, Primary Children’s Medical Center, the University of Michigan, Heartland Regional Medical Center, and many other facilities that PETA has convinced to use modern simulators for intubation training instead of animals.

While this is a great accomplishment for these cats, there are still thousands of others locked in laboratories around the country. Please take a moment to write to officials at the National Institutes of Health and ask them to end cruel brain experiments on cats at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

what is the thing you put
on my head.
i cannot move,
but feel pain,
i know that i am
not dead.
please stop this torture
that so many of us cats
have learned to dread!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson