Vet classes at UC Davis no longer fatal for lab animals
By Cynthia Hubert -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 a.m. PST Monday, November 10, 2003
Veterinary students at the University of California, Davis, no longer will perform fatal operations on dogs and cats from the Sacramento County animal shelter, ending a controversial practice that has existed for decades.
The College of Veterinary Medicine is making significant changes in its surgical training program in response to concerns by students, advocates and members of the general public, officials said.
Dogs and cats from the shelter still will be used to teach students surgical techniques, including spay and neuter procedures, but healthy animals no longer will be purchased from the county, used as training tools and then killed, they said.
The change illustrates a shifting philosophy about the ways in which creatures are used in veterinary training around the country, and represents a major victory for local advocates who have pushed for an end to the use of pound animals in terminal procedures at UC Davis.
"This is a very important step in the right direction," said Teri Barnato of the Association of Veterinarians for Animal Rights in Davis. "We have been working on this for years. We think it's fantastic."
UC Davis, like most of the nation's 28 veterinary programs, has long looked to shelters to acquire animals used in surgical training, said John Pascoe, the school's executive associate dean and a professor of surgery. But over the years, the practice has become increasingly controversial, particularly when healthy dogs and cats, many of them former pets, are killed in the interest of education.
Currently, Sacramento County's shelter is the only one in the state that allows the practice known as pound seizure. In addition to selling hundreds of animals per year to UC Davis for about $75 each, the county also has provided a much-smaller number of creatures to Sutter Medical Center for training purposes.
"It's totally inappropriate," said Jennifer Fearing of United Animal Nations, based in Sacramento. "These are animals that once were pets. If we cannot find a good home for them, they deserve the quickest and most painless end to their lives. Picking them up, putting them on a truck and driving them across the causeway so that they can have procedures done on them and then be killed is not the answer. I honestly would much prefer that they have a humane death at the shelter."
Others have argued that the practice, backed by the Board of Supervisors, is acceptable given the fact that thousands of unwanted shelter animals must be killed every year anyway for lack of room.
Pat Claerbout, director of Sacramento County's Department of Animal Care and Regulation, which operates the shelter, was reluctant to address the issue.
"The fact is that we wouldn't even have to think about this if people would just spay and neuter their animals," she said. "We have a major overpopulation problem."
More than a decade ago, partially in response to student discomfort, the UC Davis veterinary school stopped requiring courses that involved "terminal surgeries" on animals, Pascoe said. Students who opted out of those courses performed only "survival" surgeries, in which animals were treated and returned to the shelter, and worked on cadaver animals.
But the school continued to offer an elective course in which ultimately fatal operations were performed on healthy animals that were considered "unadoptable" by the county shelter.
That practice has been halted, and the school has made other changes as well, Pascoe said.
In addition to spaying and neutering animals from shelters in Sacramento, Solano and Yolo counties, the school's new surgical training program will include providing broader treatments for the creatures, including treating wounds, repairing fractured bones and removing foreign objects. Animals will be returned to the shelter after they heal, Pascoe said.
UC Davis also hopes to forge alliances with area veterinarians for referrals of animals whose owners cannot afford costly private treatments, allowing students to operate on those animals at a discounted price, he said. The university is looking for funding to build an endowment for that program.
"I think we're gaining a whole lot," Pascoe said of the new teaching plan. "I think we'll get much better quality veterinarians in terms of surgical training, and it's good for the community as well. It's the right thing to do, and we think it will be a model for others around the country."
With the changes, UC Davis becomes one of only "four or five" veterinary schools in the nation that have stopped "detrimental use" of small animals, said Lara Rasmussen, a veterinarian and animal advocate who teaches at a new school in Pomona.
Rasmussen, who graduated from UC Davis in 1993, said the changes are overdue.
"Using live animals in training veterinarians is crucially important," Rasmussen said. "But it's not necessary to harm them or kill them in the process."
Rasmussen's school, Western University of Health Sciences, is an independent, nonprofit institution that has adopted a "reverence for life" philosophy emphasizing compassion toward animals used in veterinary education.
Western University's students train on live animals but never perform "terminal" procedures, she said. The school teaches students to perform surgeries as painlessly as possible. Students and staff members do outreach work, seeking sick and injured animals from area shelters as well as pets of impoverished people, seniors and housebound residents, to use in training
programs.
"It's a moral development issue," said Rasmussen, the school's director of surgery. "It's very difficult to create an empathetic, compassionate health-care provider when you are asking people to kill something and just forget about it."
In the early 1990s, Rasmussen was among a vocal group of UC Davis students who spoke out against the practice and refused to perform terminal surgeries.
"I found it shocking and bitterly ironic that you struggle to get into veterinary school to help animals, and on the very first day you walk into an anatomy cooler and there are hundreds of animals stacked like cordwood or hanging from the ceiling on hooks, all of which have been killed in the name of education," she said. "Those animals are pound animals. To treat them like that is just wrong."
The Bee's Cynthia Hubert can be reached at (916) 321-1082 or [email protected]
