Use of live pigs helpful for combat first-aid training, medics tell study
More realistic than using simulators
Nudged by lobby groups and fast-developing technology, every hospital in Canada, all but two in the United States and many of the armed forces around the world have stopped doing it.
Instead of using live pigs, goats and other animals to teach people how to treat traumatic injury, they employ increasingly realistic human simulators.
But a newly published study that touches on a unique animal-rights question suggests that practising on pigs is invaluable preparation for real-life combat medicine, at least according to Canadian medics who served on the front lines of Afghanistan.
The anesthetized animal subjects provide a taste of battlefield first-aid that simulators cannot duplicate, said most of the medics who responded to a survey after Canada’s mission in Kandahar province ended.
“The first time a medic gets blood on their hands and tries a life-saving procedure should not be on a fellow soldier with their friends looking on,” one of them told the researchers.
“I had never seen what a gunshot wound on a person looks like,” said another medic. “The live tissue training … actually showed you what it would look like.”
The authors of the paper published this month in the journal Military Medicine, most of them Canadian Forces members or Defence employees, recommend that live animals be kept as at least part of the combatcare course. But a U.S.-based group that has lobbied hard to have the practice ended says evidence suggests that simulators are at least as good a training tool, leaving no justification for sacrificing pigs or goats.
“When you ask hardboiled, previously deployed soldiers and medics, there is going to be a certain gung-ho and macho feel to (using animals),” said Dr. John Pippin of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. “But you can get the same thing with some of these simulators … They (animals) are all traumatized in various ways, and then they are all killed.”
The committee, a vegan organization dedicated to lessening use of animals in medical research and training, has had considerable success. All 32 Canadian hospitals that conduct the advanced trauma life support program — a civilian equivalent of the military course — have now abandoned animals for simulators, as have all but two U.S. institutions. One of the Canadian centres, though, told the National Post in 2011 the change was unpopular among trainees.
A 2012 review found that 22 of 28 NATO nations now eschew use of animals in military medical training, the exceptions being Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Denmark, Norway and Poland.
Dr. Homer Tien, head of trauma surgery at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and an army colonel who co-authored the new study, could not be reached for comment.
But Jennifer Eckersley, a Forces spokeswoman, confirmed that a “few” animals are still being used in highlevel training, though the military is studying alternatives. “This training has saved soldiers’ lives,” she said. “We conduct this training in as humane a way as possible. There is an individual that must be present throughout the training, whose only responsibility is to ensure the animal does not suffer.”
Pigs are kept under anesthetics during “surgical wounding” and treatment, then euthanized, according to Tien’s paper.
Pippin said the alternatives — computerized simulators that try to duplicate the effects of injury — have developed rapidly since the end of Canada’s Afghan mission. They include “strategic operations cut suits” that are worn by real people who can act out the movements and reaction of a wounded person, and “operative experience” mannequins that are so realistic, a blood-like substance spurts out when a limb is severed, he said.
The new study notes that Canadian Forces medics actually trained solely on simulators until January 2007 — several months into the Afghanistan mission — when York-Landrace pigs were introduced, with trainees first working on the live hogs in an operating room, then in simulated combat conditions.
Medics are taught how to stop heavy bleeding; treat airway blockages by cricothyrotomy — cutting a hole in the throat; and to relieve tension pneumothoraces — potentially deadly buildups of air around the lungs — by puncturing the chest with a special needle.
Of the 38 medics who responded to the survey, 88 per cent had performed lifesaving procedures on troops in Afghanistan, most more than five times. About 90 per cent of those who had been deployed both before and after the pigs were introduced said the change was valuable and urged that it be maintained, a sentiment reflected in their comments.