Two Canadian hospitals have decided to stop using live pigs in advanced trauma-treatment courses, the latest victories for a U.S.-based group of vegan doctors that has been battling aggressively to curb the role of animals in medical training and research.

Hamilton Health Sciences in Ontario and Saint John Regional in New Brunswick say they have instead started employing high-tech patient simulators for doctors who take the program. Those involved in the Hamilton course, however, complain they made the changes under pressure, noting their pigs were treated much better than the vast majority of swine that end up in abattoirs, and that doctors learning the life-saving skills are finding the simulators to be poor replacements.

“The students are complaining that the mannequins are terrible,” said Donna Allerton, co-ordinator of the Hamilton program, associated with the respected McMaster University medical school. “These are surgeons that need to practise real-life skills. Practising on a mannequin is not good enough. ... I hear this over and over again from my students. They say, ‘bring the pigs back,’ because the tissue [on the simulator] is not lifelike.”

The hogs used at a McMaster laboratory were transported in climate-controlled trucks, kept in pens with “tender-foot” flooring, put under general anesthetic for the training, then killed with an overdose of anesthesia while still unconscious, said Katherine Delaney, the university veterinarian. Pigs taken to slaughter, on the other hand, ride in tightly packed, open-air trucks and are herded to their bloody deaths without the benefit of anesthesia, she noted.

“I’m a veterinarian, I feel I speak for the animals. I protect them. At the same time, there is an important role for animals in medical research,” she said. “I have diabetes. Where would I be if animals were not used in the discovery of insulin?”

The Advanced Trauma Life Support course is a standardized primer on basic surgical and other procedures in the treatment of trauma patients that is offered to emergency-medicine trainees, surgeons and other doctors. Over the past few years, most North American centres providing the course have moved from animal “models” for instruction to simulators or human cadavers.

Ms. Allerton charged that the transition has occurred largely under pressure from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), the Washington, D.C.-based group that campaigns in favour of vegan diets, tighter ethical control of medical research on humans and limits on the use of animals in training and science.

“They have invaded all the hospitals throughout Canada and are threatening them,” she said. “They are an American group, and they really have no right to come to Canada and threaten us.”

Dr. John Pippin, a spokesman for PCRM, confirmed that the group did file a complaint with the Canadian Council on Animal Care, urging the regulator to revoke McMaster’s “certificate of good animal use” because of the trauma training, an approach it has used with programs in Saskatchewan and Newfoundland. But he denied it used any kind of threat and noted the complaint was withdrawn once the university changed its policy.