Nov 19 2008

Grey’s Anatomy Tackles Animal Rights - Guest Blogger Mat Thomas

TV Watch: Grey’s Anatomy
by Mat Thomas

Popular and critically-acclaimed doctor show Grey’s Anatomy should be commended for recently airing an episode exploring the question of whether it is justifiable to use live animals as subjects for the education of surgeons-in-training. One of the main subplots of “Life During Wartime” (episode 506) focuses on a “skills lab” in which live, anesthetized pigs are critically injured so that they can be operated on for learning purposes, after which they are summarily euthanized. Watch a clip from the episode below. You can see the entire episode here.

Successfully dramatizing both sides of this controversy, the surgeon in charge of training residents and interns insists that operating on “live tissue” is vital to a physician’s schooling. Conversely, two residents denounce him as a “monster,” and one courageously challenges his assumptions on both moral and practical grounds. Her argument cites specific historical examples of human deaths caused by animal research (due to our physiological differences), as well as the humane alternatives to vivisection made possible by modern technology (including computerized robotic simulators that realistically respond to treatment just like people, as demonstrated in episode 506).

In addition, the resident and interns in charge of the pigs’ care demonstrate real compassion for their patients by the amount of effort and emotion they invest in saving them. They spend all day struggling to keep the mortally wounded pigs alive, only to be ordered to “terminate” them in the end because of the months of painful recovery they would suffer. 

I work for Farm Sanctuary, the nation’s leading farm animal protection organization, which has two shelters housing hundreds of animals we’ve rescued, mostly from nightmarishly cruel conditions on factory farms. In August of this year, we mobilized our supporters to protest a live pig lab that Covidien Electrosurgery had planned to conduct at a surgical conference in Colorado as a means of selling their high-tech machinery to hospital buyers. While we were able to convince the Society of Gynecological Oncologists to cancel the sales demonstration, Covidien seems determined to continue mutilating and killing pigs for marketing purposes, epitomizing the mindset of those who see animals’ lives as expendable.

All physicians are required to take the Hippocratic Oath, the first command of which is “First, do no harm,” and as one of the characters in this Grey’s Anatomy episode says, “That’s not just about humans: that’s about all living things.” She and several of her colleagues can feel empathy for animals killed in the line of duty, but what they don’t seem to realize is how much suffering and death is caused by eating animals.  Animals suffer along every step of the way from factory farm to slaughterhouse. 

While doctors save human lives, each vegan saves the lives of about 95 animals a year — and thousands of animals over the course of a lifetime. Plus, a well-balanced vegan diet is the healthiest of all, as Dr. T. Colin Campbell demonstrated in The China Study. Considered the most comprehensive study to date regarding the relationship between diet and human health, The China Study found that the consumption of animal-derived ‘food’ products was linked with “diseases of affluence” such as heart disease, osteoporosis, diabetes, and cancer. Campbell concludes that “80 to 90% of all cancers, cardiovascular diseases, and other degenerative illness can be prevented, at least until very old age - simply by adopting a plant-based diet.”

Also, plant-based diets are far more efficient and environmentally sustainable than meat-based diets.  Animal agriculture is the leading cause of global climate change and the chief source of a laundry list of ecological disasters.

Grey’s Anatomy didn’t address dietary health or environmental questions in “Life During Wartime,” but then it must be hard enough engaging one contentious issue in the limited airtime they have per episode (especially with all the romantic interludes and sexual entanglements thrown in to temper the heavy philosophical stuff). However, the show does carry storylines over from one episode to the next, so I’m hoping that in the wake of the pig lab incident, the producers will make the obvious connection, and have one of the characters go vegan soon. There are evidently a bunch of smart, caring healers at Seattle Grace Hospital, so at some point one of them has got to take a true stand for animals by making the case for veganism!