Help PCRM Stop the University of Mississippi’s Cruel Pig Lab

This week, PCRM filed a criminal complaint against the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) School of Medicine for violations of the state’s animal cruelty law for using live pigs in its training of medical students. Please help this effort by asking UMMC to end this animal use today.

UMMC uses live pigs in its medical student physiology lab. In these laboratory sessions, students place catheters in the pigs’ arteries and veins, block the animals’ arteries, and inject them with drugs. Students then open the pigs’ chest cavities and massage the hearts. Afterwards, the animals are killed.

So far, the UMMC faculty and administrators have ignored pleas to change this method. Please help us by e-mailing UMMC School of Medicine dean James Keeton, M.D., and University of Mississippi chancellor Daniel Jones, M.D., today and urging them to end this cruel and unnecessary practice.

UMMC is one of only seven medical schools in the United States and Canada still using live animals for training. Furthermore, UMMC already has a medical simulation center that could easily provide nonanimal training methods for its physiology lab.

Please e-mail Dr. Keeton and Dr. Jones today and ask them again to join the 95 percent of medical schools that use human-based training methods.