Personally if a few pigs die so that there is a greater chance of someone in the services surviving then I have no issues with it

I eat meat so have no issues with the killing of farmyard animals

Not quite. An average surgeon knows how to operate eg repair a wound. A good surgeon knows how to manage the complications. An excellent surgeon can anticipate complications before they arise and deal with it there and then. Training on live pigs would enable a surgeon to learn to anticipate - eg you could have unexpected bleeding point whilst trying to operate on a specific wound. Surgeon would then have to manage both in the operating field.

As for knowledge, all the knowledge in the world cannot replace practical experience. Humans are better than pigs but IMO pigs would be better than models by virtue of them being "alive".


Will entirely agree with this. I would want evidence that it makes a difference. But would it be easy to assess?


We wouldn't have used live pigs. We would have used humans. In the "olden" days, abscesses and appendices would be dealt with by medical students in their final year of training. That's why medical schools awarded "Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery" degrees. Nowadays, more to do with litigation I'm led to believe, it doesn't happen and the first time you use a scalpel might not be until your second year of postgraduate training. Yet medical schools are still awarding graduates with "Bachelor of Surgery". We no longer have human "guinea pigs" to practise our skills on.


Which is where the evidence comes in, as above. If it shows that using live pigs promotes better surgical skills and better outcomes for injured soldiers, I see no reason why we should stop.

Very tricky I'd have thought. Even assuming you could cancel out all the variable factors that exist in front-line medical treatment, you'd have to have two cohorts of doctors, one with the 'live subject' training and one without and compare outcomes for specific classes of injuries. However there are obvious ethical issues there. Plus the sample size (i.e. the number of injured with any specific type of wound) is likely to be quite small because despite the timbre of the news coverage, UK losses in Afghanistan aren't actually that great - they're terrible for the people involved and their families, obviously, but they are a small fraction of the number of people who get killed in road accidents over the same period for example.

In the end, the only evidence you're likely to get is the assessment of the doctors in question - do they feel their skills have been improved by the live subject training they did? Not exactly scientific, even given it would be sincere.

In the end I think the argument is similar to the use of animals in medical science - you can not really care at all, you can have a stance that it's acceptable if the benefit is great enough and the suffering inflicted on the animal is minimised as much as possible, or you can just say it's unacceptable to do regardless of the benefit. This is a moral judgement which is personal.

I do still have issues with it though on the simple basis that I looked at it and thought to myself 'If we were told someone else's army was doing that, there's a fair portion of the population that would be outraged'.

Jon

Lets use the unemployed or trainee doctors, that way they will get to experience the trauma that the patient is in so will have more empathy with the wounded. /s

IRA had the idea of shooting pigs first.

*grabs coat*