Originally posted by Ladybug
For the lab group time (senior year) it was only people who took small animal surgery elective. We used bone models for most of the course and only used live dogs when the benefit of live tissue was important,...and there were about 1/3 of groups who chose cadavers instead.
For spay and neuter labs, the sophomores practice on cadavers and then move to live shelter dogs which are later adopted out. There is also a feral cat trap-neuter-release program where students get to neuter and spay cats once a month with vet supervision.
It certainly sucks to kill purpose-bred dogs in the name of science and medicine. But I feel it's worse to kill patients because we are unprepared. I have classmates who disagreed with me and I respect that too.
One of the things they don't like to talk about either is that most of the cadavers are purpose-bred as well. Either they weren't needed for a study or the study finished and the dogs bodies were still good. The idea of breeding dogs just for research falls into the same category for me as food animals. But again some of my classmates felt differently about dogs vs food animals and some of my classmates felt they were the same and we shouldn't do either.
It's something that comes up a lot in vet school.
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