We need your help in making Laval University, in Quebec City, Canada, a better place for pediatricians to train. Laval University’s pediatrics residents are taught emergency medical skills on piglets. If these piglets were not used in this training, they could grow up to be healthy, loving pigs like Esther.

In this training, residents make an incision between a piglet’s ribs, insert tubes into the chest cavity, insert a needle into the abdominal cavity, cut open and insert a needle into a piglet’s veins, and insert a needle under the breast bone and into the sac surrounding the heart. Each piglet is then killed and residents are instructed to make incisions in the animal’s throat, into which a tube is inserted.

To think about Esther’s cousins being used like this makes all of us terribly sad—especially when using piglets is completely avoidable. Laval is the only pediatrics residency program in Canada using animals for this purpose. The remaining programs use human-based methods like medical simulators.

It is time for Laval to join the rest of Canada’s pediatrics residency programs by replacing the use of piglets with human-based training methods. I hope you will join us and Esther by letting Laval University know it’s time to end this unnecessary use of animals in pediatrics resident training.