10 Reasons to Scrap the Medical Schools Dog Lab

1. Dogs are killed in the dog lab. If the dogs come from shelters (or from dealers who often buy them from shelters), the most adoptable dogs are often taken, as they are former pets and are easy for lab personnel to handle.
2. Before being killed, the dogs are traumatized. Shipping, caging, isolation, restraint, noise, and abnormalities in food, water, and lighting are routine in animal labs.
3. If anesthesia is not carefully monitored, the dogs may awaken during the laboratory and experience pain and trauma.
4. Dog labs aggravate animal control problems. Some people abandon dogs rather than bring them to shelters if they fear that the animals could end up as lab specimens. The result is more litters, and more unwanted animals.
5. Most students find dog labs offensive. Some schools report that student opinion played a role in eliminating these exercises.
6. Doctors seek to “first, do no harm.” Animal labs can encourage a desensitization to suffering and death, and reinforce the idea that nonhuman animals are “things” without lives of their own or the ability to feel pain and fear.
7. Lectures, readings, supplemental videotapes, and computer and videodisc simulations are a better way to teach basic medical concepts. They are repeatable and do not pose the distractions of live animal labs.
8. Doctors get plenty of hands-on experience during internship and residency assisting in operating rooms and other clinical settings under close supervision, using synthetic teaching aids when appropriate. That is the ideal and traditional way of learning surgical techniques.
9. Top schools have already dropped dog labs, including Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, Baylor, and more than a quarter of all other American medical schools.
10. Money should be used for better educational experiences. The University of Minnesota recently reduced the use of dog labs in its courses and expects to save $35,000 to $45,000 a year.