The common ferret is apparently enough like a human infant that medical students can insert tubes into the ferrets’ throats as practice for doing the same thing on critically underweight babies. UW students do it. But unfortunately for the school, there’s a chance it may be illegal.The Seattle Times
reports today on the subject of ferrets and higher education: always a favorite.It seems the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a Washington D.C.-based animal rights group, has filed a federal complaint with the Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service on the basis that shoving tubes down ferrets’ throats violates the Animal Welfare Act.Dr. John Pippin, a Dallas cardiologist who co-authored the complaint, tells the Times that UW is “using an educational method that, in our view, is not justifiable.”In response, UW’s Dr. Dennis Maylock, director of the university’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, says the animals are anesthetized before the intubations, and that they can usually handle about six to eight attempts without harm to their airways, and thus can be used every two weeks.”They think we’re in violation of animal-welfare laws. They’re entitled to their opinion, but I don’t think we are,” (Maylock says).He also says that the animals are well cared for otherwise and are not euthanized, but rather adopted out after they turn 6 years old or so.It’s not the first time the UW has taken heat for how it treats its research animals.The UW has been cited in the past for deficiencies in animal research, including allowing a monkey to starve in 2009. In 2008, it had to return $20,000 in federal research grant money after a finding that it had allowed unauthorized surgeries on primates. Inspectors found serious deficiencies in animal-care facilities in 2006 and put the UW on probation.Here’s a U.S. Navy study that looks at the pros and cons of using ferrets for intubation practice. Among other things, it finds that about 2 percent of the ferrets show signs of larynx irritation after repeated use as breathing-tube guinea pigs:
