PETA India Animal Times Monsoon 2020

When it comes to teaching future medical professionals the skills they need to save lives, advanced, non-animal methods are the gold standard. The world’s top medical schools – including Harvard, Duke, and Yale – use them, and the Indian government has acknowledged the superiority of such human-relevant teaching tools. That’s why a central government circular prohibits using animals in teaching or to train students. Instead, they must incorporate modern, humane methods such as computer simulations and life-like, high-fidelity human patient simulators that can “breathe” and even “bleed”. However, while Indian undergraduate medical lessons largely eliminated animal exploitation a decade ago, PETA India received complaints that such cruelty continued in postgraduate education. And now, animals are in even more danger: the Medical Council of India’s recent changes to the Postgraduate Medical Education Regulations, 2000, make experiments on animals a mandatory component of postgraduate physiology and pharmacology courses – despite the longstanding central government instruction against their use. PETA India is urging Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan to spare animals terrible suffering and give medical students the best training available by requiring the exclusive use of computer-assisted models and other sophisticated, non-animal methods. PETA India Asks Medical Council to CUT THE CRUELTY

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WHAT YOU CAN DO Please politely urge the minister to prohibit animal use in medical education and instead promote modern technology, thus ensuring the highest academic standards in India’s medical schools, and encourage others to contact him, too:

Dr Harsh Vardhan Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare Ministry of Health and Family Welfare Room No 348, 'A' Wing Nirman Bhavan New Delhi 110 011 hfm@gov.in; dr.harshvardhan@gov.in

What Will Your Legacy Be?

Riddhi Kumar knew to contact PETA India when she found a young barn owl who was distressed and weak, and our Emergency Response Team – which is on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to help animals – swooped in. After spending time in the care of a rehabilitator, the owl recovered and again was able to fly free. We are working to bring about a society in which all animals can live as they were meant to. You can help create that future by making a legacy gift to PETA India in your estate plans, ensuring that we can continue to rescue animals long after you’re gone. You can name PETA India in your will to receive a specific sum of money, a piece of property, or a percentage of your residuary estate (the part that remains after all specific legacies and expenses have been accounted for). Through such a legacy gift, the work that you support in your lifetime will live on in your name well into the future.

Please contact our team at Legacies@petaindia.org or on 022-40727382 for more information. All enquiries are kept confidential.

An owl is saved!

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© Sreedhar Vijayakrishnan