During vet school, did you ever practice on animals and then euthanize them? Were there ever experiments, etc done on animals that would cause them to suffer in any way? Did you ever practice on dead animals that were killed in order for you to learn?
Ah, a hard hitting question.
So, some of you are not going to like this question, or its answer. Some of you are going to have very strong opinions and some of you will probably like me and my profession a lot less after this answer. Some of you will find this topic confronting.
The short answer is yes, animals are used in the education of veterinary students, and some of them die.
But significant effort is put into reducing the amount of animals used and how invasive the activities they are used for are.
For example, vet students need to learn how to do a physical exam. You need to be taught how to take a heart rate, how to take a temperature and blood pressure, etc. You can really only learn how to examine a living animal. Other learning situations substitute something else for the living animal.
I would also preface this topic by saying that non-recovery surgeries do and did happen, but nobody is particularly proud of it. However they were at the time deemed necessary for a veterinary education and of benefit for animal welfare as a whole by educating vet students.
This is a big topic so Iâm going to try to divide it up into sections:
As some examples from my vet degree, early on in physiology courses we had âexperimentsâ to do, which involved either videos of mice administered different medications, on ourselves, on tissue samples from a single animal distributed among the class, some very energetic rats and pithed cane toads. As for whether they suffered or died:
The mice in the videos probably did not enjoy the sedatives they were administered, but the small number of mice used then went on to educate many years of students.
A single animal (a laboratory rabbit) was euthanized to provide tissue samples for the entire class. One additional rabbit was used to demonstrate the effects of medication in a living system for the entire class also.
A few dozen rats spent half an hour or so in a sealed tube designed to measure their oxygen output, then went on to live their lives.
The pithed cane toads were definitely killed for our education, but they are a feral pest species in Australia and would have been killed anyway, we just benefited from a useful body to learn from.
The ethics of these examples are all a little different. Yes we used a lot of rats in one experiment, but it was very low stress and caused them no permanent damage and no significant compromise. The pithed cane toads were all dead, but they didnât die for the purposes of education, they were going to die anyway, we just used the bodies. The rabbit was directly killed for our education, but one rabbit educated 120 students and so it was deemed worthwhile and a justifiable cost.
âDissectionâ is a word that no doubt conjures up vivid and grotesque imagery of animal abuse, however dissection strictly occurs strictly on dead animals. Yes, we dissected animals in vet school. Lots of them.
In the first half of the course we learned anatomy in part by performing dissections. Most of these initially were on greyhounds: dogs that were euthanized as âwasteâ from the racing industry. Some poor gentleman had the job of calling clinics which serviced the racing industry and requesting cadavers for our studies. Some weeks we had more dogs available than others.
The benefits of greyhounds is that each group had a body that was more or less the same, they were entire (not desexed), had really good muscle definition and were healthy.
(There were some vegans in my year that refused to participate in this for ethical reasons, and the university struggled to find people willing to donate their euthanized petsâ bodies to be dissected instead.)
Itâs a kind of weird situation to be in. Youâre in vet school because you really care about animals and their welfare, yet here are some that have sort of died for your education, for you. They havenât really died for you, the racing industry was going to kill them anyway, yet here they are.
It does dwell on your mind. Everybody reconciles this differently. Myself, I promised the sacrifice (as I saw it) of those twelve dogs that I would be worth it. That I would use the education I gained to make a difference, that I would save at least twelve more.
We also dissected parts of animals and those that died of natural causes. âWasteâ organs from abattoirs were a common example, because they always have hearts, lungs and uteri to spare. Some wildlife, lambs, aborted fetuses and chickens were used in this way also.
So these animals werenât killed directly for our education, but they were kind of harvested for it, if indirectly. They were killed, absolutely, but they werenât killed for us. We just used the waste.
This is probably the topic you really anted to know about. Did we, or did I, use animals in our education that would then either suffer or be killed.
There were three classes in my vet school days that required dogs to be used for non-recovery surgery. These were surgeries where the dog was placed under general anaesthetic, so they feel nothing, the procedure was done while they were alive, and then they were euthanized while under the general anaesthetic.
If that feels ethically kind of weird to you, it should. It is very much in a grey area. Let me give you some more information about these dogs.
Three dogs were used for each group of three students, averaging one dog per student.
They were all taken from âdeath rowâ from animal shelters. Dogs that had not been adopted and run out of time.
Most of them had behavioral issues. Some had medical issues.
They were treated with the same care and respect as a recovery surgery.
Under general anaesthetic they are completely unaware and unconscious.
So the dogs were considered, unfortunately, a âwaste productâ of society. Hundreds of thousands just like them are put to sleep for the same reasons every year.
Once they are under anaesthetic, they feel nothing. This is where the animalâs consciousness ends. Euthanasia involves an anaesthetic overdose, we just didnât overdose them until the end.
The surgeries performed included a spey, a lung lobe removal and an intestinal anastamosis. If the students had performed these imperfectly, the animal would not wake up to suffer, nor would it need to endure the recovery period.
They provided an educational opportunity for both surgery and anaesthesia, which are important learning areas.
That this happened a decade ago. I personally have been graduated a long time, and technology advances in the meantime. There are better surgical models available now for training students, especially with routine procedures such as speys. The amount of animals used in this way is decreasing, and if you want more information youâd be best to talk to a current veterinary student, not a vet whoâs a decade removed from the practice.
But I have to say, there is nothing quite like having your hand inside a living, breathing animal for the first time. Youâve trained and practiced on long-dead, frozen things prior to this. Now you have a âpatientâ whoâs warm. They have a pulse. Theyâre not gently rotting with a permeating shade of green. You can see the life in them, and itâs both wonderful and terrifying. It is most certainly humbling.
But I canât pretend itâs a black and white ethical issue.
These animals did die in order for me to learn. They would have died anyway, but they died for us.
As a vet you have to know how to hold a cat, restrain a dog, herd a cow and not get murdered by a horse. You have to know how to do a physical exam on a living patient.
The university kept âteaching animalsâ of a variety of species. These animals were generally placid and used to being handled, and were used for teaching all sorts of basic skills from how to take a temperature to how to do a pregnancy test.
It was possible for them to get stressed, especially with lots of handling, so care had to be taken to rotate them out and give them a break. Some of these animals also doubled as blood donors.
Thereâs not really a substitute for a live, thinking animal when learning handling. At some point you need the real thing.
So these animals might have been stressed, and you could argue that they had the potential to suffer, but they were closely supervised and werenât killed for our education.
I hope that has answered your question, Anon, though Iâm sure there will have been other questions raised. I donât mind discussing this at all, but like I said it was a decade since I did some of these things, and there are fresher vet students who should be listened to in this topic too. I hope everyone can remain civil towards each other in this discussion.
