The University’s use of live cats to train graduate physicians on how to insert breathing tubes into critically ill newborns has drawn ire from animal-rights groups around the country. Dozens, including former Charlottesville mayor Dave Norris and a man in a full-body cat suit, demonstrated in front of the Rotunda last April, and former “The Price is Right” host Bob Barker, who gave the University $1 million in 2009 to establish an animal law program, penned a letter to University President Teresa Sullivan protesting the training technique. But the Medical Center last week quietly abandoned the practice.
In a semester rife with public-relations challenges — students campaigning for a living wage staged a hunger strike outside the Rotunda, and former University student George Huguely stood trial for the murder of his ex-girlfriend Yeardley Love — last spring’s cat controversy attracted a surprising amount of attention. A change.org petition protesting the University’s use of cats in medical training garnered 185,120 online signatures. This number, it turns out, is more than 60,000 signatures per cat. Only three felines — Alley, Kiki and Fiddle — were part of the intubation training.
The University has now adopted out its three cats, which went to local residents. The Medical Center does not intend to replace the animals.
It is not surprising that the Medical Center has abandoned the somewhat antiquated practice of training with cats. But it is puzzling that the University has not broadcast the news or offered a public explanation for why it has stopped using the animals.
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that opposes the use of animals in medical school curricula, was one of the cat-intubation policy’s most ardent opponents. John J. Pippin, the committee’s director of academic affairs, told The Daily Progress this weekend that the group uncovered the Medical Center’s shift through public-records requests.
The University’s decision to stop using cats as part of its medical training flies in the face of the school’s earlier public justifications for the practice. In a Jan. 2012 letter to Pippin, Steven DeKosky, then-Medical School dean, contended that the use of cats in the breathing-tube training provided physicians with a level of proficiency they could not gain from practicing on simulators.
Even if DeKosky’s assessment was correct, the decision to use live cats in training requires tricky moral calculus. Is inflicting harm on a cat — even if the harm is minimal, as the University claimed — justified if it saves the lives of multiple newborns? Or does using a cat as a training object diminish the animal’s dignity to a point that is unacceptable? The better route, regardless, is to pursue a more effective simulator. A better simulator avoids the moral problem of inflicting harm on animals. It would also provide physicians with better training. The anatomy of a cat is quite different from that of an infant.
In a Nov. 2011 press release the University claimed that the “expertise gained in intubating cats…prevents the damage done to babies by inexperienced responders.”
If such justifications for why the Medical Center persisted in using cats as part of the curricula were accurate, it would follow that the school has developed a better simulator for the intubation training. Otherwise, if we take the University’s earlier claims about the necessity of using cats at face value, the decision to no longer use cats in the absence of a more effective simulator would come at the expense of good pediatric treatment.
It seems that the University would want to loudly announce that it no longer uses cats for medical training. Such an announcement would gain the school well-deserved points for ethically conscious medicine and respect for animals. Considering how much negative publicity the cat-intubation procedure sparked last year — and considering the school’s defense of the practice — the University should have issued a public statement explaining why it dropped the procedure.
Having a public-records request unveil what should be positive news for the University puts the school in an awkward position. University officials should have seized the chance to tell this story, which does, after all, cast the school in a good light. But they let the news go by without a purr.
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