Alternatives to Animal Research for Education

The majority of medical schools in the United States, including Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, have replaced their use of live animals in physiology, pharmacology, and/or surgical-training exercises with humane and effective non-animal teaching methods, including observation of actual human cardiac bypass surgery, patient simulators, cadavers, sophisticated computer programs, and more.

WARN is encouraging WWU to model after leading schools like Harvard and Stanford and replace archaic, expensive and unreliable animal methods with new, inexpensive and reliable non animal methods.

Please help us achieve this by signing our petition below to stop animal research at WWU HERE.

                                                      Why alternatives?

In addition to being more humane, non-animal teaching tools such as computer simulations, multimedia CD-ROMs, and models are also more economical than traditional animal-based teaching exercises.

The “traditional” approach involves the acquisition and disposal of animals on an ongoing basis, purchasing a set of CD-ROMs represents a one-time expenditure for a product that can be used repeatedly for many years. Schools can save tens of thousands of dollars each year by implementing re-usable replacements for animal “specimens.”

Studies have shown that non-animal teaching methods are as effective as older, less humane methods. For example:

 -A study of first-year biology undergraduates found that examination results of those students who used model rats were equivalent to those who had performed rat dissections.

 - A similar study examined a class of first-year biology students, half of whom used traditional “hands-on” laboratories while the remainder used computer software. Biology knowledge of the computer-taught students increased significantly more than did that of the traditional group.

courtesy: PETA