San Diego, CA – Tens of thousands of animals are intentionally hurt and killed in crude medical training drills each year and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)'s work to stop this has made it a finalist for the country's largest social impact competition.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has been named one of 27 finalists out of 3,600 applicants for the 2014 CLASSY Awards in recognition of its international efforts to promote and fund the replacement of animals in medical training exercises with modern simulation tools. The eight winners of the competition, which is co-sponsored by the United Nations Foundation, will be announced at a ceremony on May 3, 2014 in San Diego.
Many civilian and military medical training programs around the world continue to shoot, dismember, cut into and kill tens of thousands of animals each year in training exercises despite the existence of superior medical simulators that spare animals' lives and have been shown to better prepare medical personnel,. PETA works globally to replace these archaic animal laboratories with state-of-the-art human simulation tools through its use of undercover investigations, protests, legal petitions, collaborations with experts, scientific research, lobbying, corporate outreach, media campaigns and medical equipment donations.
In late 2013, PETA donated 64 state-of-the-art TraumaMan surgical simulators to surgical training programs in Bolivia, Costa Rica, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Mexico, Mongolia, Panama, and Trinidad and Tobago to replace these nations' use of animals for Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS) courses. As a result, more than 10,000 ATLS trainees each year will now be trained with TraumaMan instead of cutting into thousands of live dogs, goats, pigs, and sheep. Running the courses with the reusable and portable TraumaMan also costs substantially less than animal use and allows the life-saving training course to be offered more frequently in remote areas where there is limited or no access to medical facilities.
PETA's recent campaigns have also prompted the U.S. Army and U.S. Coast Guard to substantially scale back their use of animals in trauma training drills and expand the use of non-animal training methods, and convinced Poland's armed forces to completely replace the use of animals with simulation technology. More than 80 percent of NATO nations now use exclusively non-animal methods for military training, and the few still using animals have launched a working group aimed at ending the practice as a result of efforts by PETA. Similarly, following discussions with PETA, military and civilian medical centers across the U.S. have replaced their use of cats and ferrets in pediatric intubation training with life-like infant simulators.
"PETA is honored to be recognized by the CLASSY Awards for its international work to modernize medical training by replacing the archaic use of dogs, pigs and other animals with humane and superior simulation tools," says PETA's director of laboratory investigations Justin Goodman. "Greater use of human simulation technology in medical training protects animals and better equips doctors and other medical professionals to treat victims of accidents and violence."
In 2013, PETA's Laboratory Investigations Department received the LUSH Prize Public Awareness Award for its work to educate the public about the abuse of animals in laboratories.
To learn more, visit PETA.org/TraumaMan