Dead dogs, electrified earthworms and restrained ruminants: student opinion on animal use in preclinical veterinary education

Students come to the vet school mustard keen to care for animals, be they cats and dogs, farm animals and horses, or wildlife and exotic species. They aim to make animals better and expect that their education will be focussed towards that end. They will realise perhaps that their teaching will include some dissection in anatomy and training in animal handling requiring some discomfort to be experienced by a few animals. So it can come as a surprise, even a shock, to be confronted in their first few weeks with quite the number of dead animals to dissect in anatomy, with live earthworms on which to experiment in physiology classes, and with farm animals used again and again by multiple students to practice handling techniques. They will work on farms in their vacations where the standard of animal welfare may not be what they would hope to expect. But do they complain? The covert power structures between lecturers and students mean making negative comments is difficult. The very fact they are being helped by farmers to fulfil the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeon’s requirements for extramural studies makes it difficult to question animal use on whichever facility they are working. The teaching of veterinary ethics is a key part of veterinary education, and yet instruction in ethics is very different from learning anatomy or physiology. Students often come with an ethical framework which may well these days include a vegetarian or vegan element. Their perspective on the ethics of animal use may be very different from those of their lecturers. So how are we to teach veterinary ethics and how does animal use in their education influence students’ understanding of the rights and wrongs of animal use more generally? Here I document and discuss opinions of veterinary students on the use of animals in their preclinical education. My understanding of these has been gained through conversations both during teaching and more informally. I had anticipated obtaining a semi-quantitative assessment through thematic analysis of our discussions together, but students’ opinions were so powerfully put that I have used numerous extended exemplars to highlight the student voice in a way that I hope shows it better than reducing it to a quantitative evaluation of what proportion of students hold one view over and against another. The very act of asking students to debate and discuss animal use, hearing all their voices in small groups has, I hope to show, increased their understanding of the ethics of animal use in a way no didactic lecture course on ethics ever could.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Education (EdD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Williams, David

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Morrison-Helme, Morag

• Animal welfare
• Veterinary education
• Veterinary ethics

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/0dd67ccf-cd9b-4f90-a5f1-972791c9acb4/download
• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.111791

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/373282