SAN DIEGO -- UC San Diego Medical School students are no longer required to take a course in which live dogs are used for surgical and drug demonstrations before they are destroyed.

"The main concern was that this issue had become so heated, it was impairing both the ability of students to learn and faculty to teach," Dr. Igor Grant, chairman of UCSD's Faculty Council, which made the decision, told The San Diego Union-Tribune.

The courses, called "dog labs," will be offered as an elective to students, said Grant, executive chairman of UCSD's Department of Psychiatry. The labs have been part of the core curriculum for first-year physiology and pharmacology medical students since 1968.

Doctors Against Dog Labs, a group of physicians and physician researchers around the country, opposed the labs. They had waged a five-year campaign to convince UCSD that the practice is unnecessary and cruel.

The group says the lessons can be learned with a compact disc and that the dogs, between 24 and 56 purchased each year since 1996, suffer in confinement.

The dogs are brought to the labs heavily anesthetized.

In the physiology class, students watch a surgeon cut open the dogs' chest cavities to reveal beating hearts and the flow of blood.

In the pharmacology class, students insert catheters into the dogs' veins, arteries and hearts to measure changes in blood pressure and respiration as various drugs are injected.

According to the group, surveys of other medical schools around the country reveal that UCSD is the only medical school in the state, and one of just a few in the country, that expected students to take the course.