Hagmann has drawn fire from animal rights groups for years because he is a leading practitioner of "live-tissue training," which involves teaching students by using wounded live animals as patients.
Earlier today, PETA sent to U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter a summary of an undercover video it says it took during a 2013 training session by Hagmann's company. The group also asked the Pentagon to cease contracting with DMI. Goodman said the video depicts gratuitous violence against the wounded pigs, and racist and sexist jokes by course instructors.
Given the involvement of PETA in this "investigation", I would take any of the claims in this article with a HUGE grain of salt.
Members of PETA are not above infiltrating a group that uses animals and pretending to be researchers, slaughterhouse workers, caretakers, etc., and then abusing the animals on their own time while filming videos "exposing" the animal abuse that supposedly takes place at these facilities. One should never assume that a PETA allegation is true, and one should always suspect that their video "exposes" consist entirely of PETA moles who recorded themselves abusing animals.
Animals used for trauma/surgical training are knocked out with ketamine and never feel a thing. They are euthanized without ever being allowed to wake up, so truly are unaware of any procedures practiced on them. And, as a vet told me, when people train on live animals, they feel an urgency that is simply not present if they just practice on dummies. The training is far better and they remember the lessons learned.
And remember that PETA has a nasty habit of taking dogs and cats that they claim they will find homes for, and then murdering them as soon as the former owner is out of sight. They only bother looking for homes for less than 1% of the animals they take into their "shelters." They do NOT care about animals. They have an anti-human political agenda, and animals are their tools for pushing it.
The first animal rights raid was the Penn head injury lab. I was in a program across town at the time. Our training set aside a third year to do research. We were encouraged to come up with our own ideas, I chose involuntary movement disorders. The U of Pa guys didn’t get a choice. They had to spend a year with the primates doing the protocols for primate head injury. They model they used at the time, as I recall, was to attach a cylinder to the skull that could suddenly introduce various volumes into the skull quickly. It was a valid model to reproduce a menengial artery tear/epidural hematoma and if introduced fast enough would produce rotational acceleration of the brain reproducing closed head injury. The year before the resident resented being forced to do this and so made disparaging comments on the tapes which he then released to the animal rights activists. At least that was the story I heard. The thing that made the case so damning was the comments this guy had made intentionally to discredit the program.