Animal rights advocates protested outside of Baystate Medical Center Monday night.
The group, Western Massachusetts Animal Rights Advocates, held signs outside of the hospital saying “end deadly pig lab.” The group alleges that Baystate’s advance trauma life support training uses pigs unnecessarily instead of their available simulators.
The hospital’s trauma division told 22News in a statement that Baystate uses their simulators “as much as possible” and “are used in the vast majority of all simulated training” and said live animals are only used when “very specific medical conditions or traumatic injuries cannot be replicated via simulation.”
Sheryl Becker from Western Mass. Animal Rights Advocates said, “It’s much more effective to use a human simulator, just because it is so identical to humans and pigs have very different bodies.”
“Computers, they’re not really humans, cause every human has like a different situation you know,” Blake Perry of Springfield said. “The computer can’t really simulate all of that.”
The animal rights group has also taken out a billboard on I-291 protesting the use of animals at the hospital.
