River Pauley, 2, walks Chebby, a pot-bellied and mini pig hybrid, during a protest Thursday by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine at MU’s Memorial Union. “We just want to advocate for the pigs,” said Krista Pauley, River’s mother. “We heard about the research Mizzou is doing, and we wanted to try to help end the invasive procedures that are done to the pigs.”
Members of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine wheeled five boxes of printed and signed petitions through the doors of Jesse Hall on Thursday, calling for an end to animal use in MU's emergency medicine training program.
The delivery of the 52,454 petitions was part of a protest put on by the committee outside of Memorial Union. Around a dozen protesters — accompanied by a pet pig — were in attendance and advocating against the killing of pigs in medical training at MU.
Dr. Kerry Foley and Reina Pohl with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine walk from Memorial Union to Dr. Mun Choi’s office in Jesse Hall with five boxes of petitions on Thursday at MU in Columbia. “We’ve been working on a campaign to convince emergency medicine residencies across North America to stop using live animals for surgical procedural training for their residents,” Dr. Foley, a retired emergency medicine doctor with a 30-year career in the D.C. area, said.
Leah Drummond holds a pig named Chebby while talking to protestors on Thursday outside Memorial Union in Columbia. “I’m just really an environmentalist,” Drummond said. “I want to minimalize — well, not even just minimalize — eradicate all the harm that’s being done to the beautiful animals of this world.”
Dr. Kerry Foley, the day’s spokesperson on site for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, lifts a dolly of boxes into Jesse Hall on Thursday in Columbia. “When you’re in the 3% (of training programs that still use live animals), we feel it’s very difficult to continue to defend that,” Dr. Foley said. “We think that the use of live animals is unnecessary and it’s cruel.”
As part of their protest, members of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine delivered boxes of petitions and a letter to Dr. Mun Choi on Thursday at MU in Columbia. The boxes contained demands from 52,454 petitioners for Dr. Choi and the Presidents of the University of Missouri to “stop killing animals to train physicians.”
UM System President Dr. Mun Choi’s office staff tell Reina Pohl, center, and Dr. Kerry Foley, not pictured, where to place their boxes of petitions on Thursday at Jesse Hall in Columbia. “If you (learn how to do a procedure) on a pig, you get one shot, and you better learn how to do it because the pig’s gonna be slaughtered, and that’s the end of your training,” Dr. Foley said. “If you do it on a simulator, you can do it over, and over, and over again until you master that skill.”
