End Mass General's Sheep Lab

Please join PCRM on Oct. 15 in Boston to end Mass General's sheep lab. PCRM physicians will lead an educational demonstration to bring attention to Massachusetts General Hospital’s use of live sheep in trauma training courses.

At Mass General, ATLS courses typically involve cutting open live, anesthetized sheep and practicing procedures such as inserting a tube and needle into the animals’ chest cavities and cutting into their throats. After the training session, the animals are killed. Mass General continues this inhumane practice even though the American College of Surgeons has approved simulators for this training. The hospital even owns and uses one of the simulators to teach ATLS surgical skills to medical students—but it continues to use live sheep to teach the very same procedures to practicing physicians.