PETA urges Health Sciences Center to stop practicing on live cats

Cats from a West Texas animal shelter have been used for years to train students at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, a practice university and shelter officials plan to continue despite outcries from the largest animal rights organization in the world.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals urged the university to stop using cats to train medical students on Wednesday, describing it in a news release as cruel and outdated and issuing a call to action on its Web site.

TTUHSC has annually purchased about five or six stray cats from Odessa Animal Control since the 1980s, said Cpl. Sherrie Carruth, a spokesperson for the city's police department, which oversees the shelter.

Cats already scheduled to be euthanized at the shelter are transported to Lubbock, where medical students use them to practice methods they'd use to save the lives of infants and young children, according to a statement from TTUHSC's Office of Communications. General anesthesia is administered to the cats during the procedures and they are euthanized once the training is over, according to the statement.

"All personnel involved have the highest regard for animal welfare," reads one of two statements TTUHSC released Thursday in response to A-J questions.

"The specific use of a small number of cats ... to simulate real-world situations continues to be essential for teaching our health care providers to obtain a successful outcome when presented with a critically ill infant or child," the statement reads.

The school could easily adopt better, more humane training methods, a PETA spokeswoman said. Most universities use human-like manikins instead of animals to practice life-saving procedures, PETA Research Associate Ian Smith said.

"I think it's indicative of the fact that Texas Tech is radically out of sync with the rest of the medical community," Smith said.

Last year, TTUHSC purchased six cats from Odessa Animal Control in early October, according to documents that PETA obtained through the Texas Public Information Act. Nearly 50 students of the university's neo-natal intensive care unit used the cats later that month to practice inserting breathing tubes and administering needle treatments, according to the documents, which PETA provided to The Avalanche-Journal. The school set up three training sessions and 15 to 18 students practiced on two cats during each session, a document shows.

TTUHSC paid $90 for the six cats, a receipt shows.

The Health Sciences Center is the only institution the Odessa shelter sells animals to, its spokeswoman, Carruth, said.

"This is supporting and helping the medical community," she said.

PETA studied medical training methods at hundreds of universities, Smith said, and TTUHSC is the only one he is aware of that still uses cats, he said.

To comment on this story:

marlena.hartz@lubbockonline.com l 766-8753

walt.nett@lubbockonline.com l 766-8706

First appeared on lubbockonline.com: 2:57 p.m. Thursday.

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