‘No Harm’ Approach to Medicine

Thirty students, standing around several stainless steel tables, are poking at dead dogs with scalpels. It’s a scene that would likely raise the hackles of most dog owners -- or prompt them to hide under a bed.

But these students, members of the first class at Western University’s new veterinary school in Pomona, actually are practicing what the school calls “no harm” medicine. They are part of what school leaders say is a revolution in the way that veterinary medicine is taught and practiced in the United States.

At many schools, it’s common practice to buy live dogs and cats from pounds or biomedical firms, then have students operate on them and later euthanize them. But these kinds of surgeries won’t occur at Western, which has pledged to use donated animals only -- those that have already died of natural causes or been put to sleep because of illness or old age.

“I don’t know that I could dissect an animal knowing that it was killed for that purpose,” said Rebecca Merlo, 23, of San Diego as she tries to find the shoulder joint of the dog she’s working on. “I’m glad I don’t have to be a part of that.”

Lecturing, too, has been abolished at Western; it’s considered too boring and ineffective. Nor is there a veterinary hospital on campus. Students instead will hone their diagnostic and treatment skills in courses where they are presented with theoretical case studies -- such as a dog with a tricky shoulder. Later, they will get much of their training alongside real vets in clinics throughout Southern California.

“I think that most veterinary schools bristle at the words ‘animal rights’ because they perceive it as a bunch of wild-eyed lunatics freeing animals and burning down buildings,” said Shirley Johnston, the dean of Western’s veterinary school. “I know that our job is to educate students. But we think we should stand for this.”

The school, which opened in August, is the only one in the state besides UC Davis. It adds some distinctive touches. Several days before the students began dissecting their dogs, for example, a ceremony was held in which the dogs’ owners told students about their deceased pets’ lives, even showing them videos.

“Other vet programs and labs that I toured, you’re being educated with tools that are just perceived as meat,” said Brian Van Horn, 29, a student from Porterville. “Here we actually know the names of our cadavers. We get information about the lives they led.”

Some veterinarians applaud the school’s approach.

“I know people who have literally been waiting for years for Western to open,” said Linnaea Stull, a veterinarian in Atascadero on the Central Coast.

In 1999, Stull helped lead a student revolt at the University of Illinois. Veterinary students had alleged that the school was asking them to kill animals for no good reason -- sometimes to see how an infection destroyed an animal’s organs.

Other animal doctors wonder whether pet owners will muster the emotional strength to donate animals to the school for hands-on dissections. They also wonder whether the lack of operations on live animals at the school will deprive students of surgical experience.

“It’s certainly a different flavor” at Western, said Jack Walther, president of the American Veterinary Medical Assn. “From my own personal perspective, there is a certain necessity to doing some procedures on a warm body, if you will. It’s just the reality of learning medicine.”

There are an estimated 61.9 million dogs, 68.9 million cats, 10.1 million pet birds and 5.1 million horses in the U.S., and millions more farm, zoo and research animals, according to the veterinarians’ organization.

Although the number of pets has increased in the U.S. in recent years, the number of veterinarians has not. Most of the nation’s veterinary programs were established in the late 1800s or early 1900s at large agricultural schools, such as Texas A&M;, Illinois, Minnesota, Washington State and UC Davis. In those days, most veterinarians were men treating farm animals.

These days, most veterinarians-in-training are not men; 73 of the 86 students in Western’s first class are women. And few universities are willing to found veterinary schools, which are expensive to operate, when they are strapped for funds to run existing programs.

Including Western, there are 28 veterinary colleges in the U.S., not enough to meet demand. Recent statistics from the American Medical Assn. and the Assn. of American Veterinary Medical Colleges suggest that it is now harder to get into veterinary school than medical school.

In the past, ethics was an important part of a veterinarian’s education, but hardly at the top of the list. That has changed markedly, because most students who go to the agricultural schools end up in cities, caring for small pets -- and because urban pet owners sometimes see their animals as having the same rights as humans.

“When I was a student at Washington State, I took a junior surgery course. Every week we would anesthetize a dog and do a specified surgical procedure,” Johnston said, recalling her days as a student in the early 1970s. “We might break the femur, then pin it, or resect a loop of intestine or spay it. Then we might wake the dog up and do something different. At the end of the semester we would put it to sleep ....

“It would never have occurred to me then that I shouldn’t do this. I’m ashamed to tell you I didn’t question it.”

By the time Johnston took the job at Western in 1998, when the veterinary school was in the planning stage, she had decided not just to question it -- but to change it. She created the school’s “reverence for life” program and decided it would be a major part of the school’s marketing effort to new students.

On a tour of the school, Johnston enters a classroom and points out a board with pegs in it. Next to the board is a box with a hole in it large enough to accommodate a human arm.

Johnston said that when she was a student, she and her peers would line up behind a cow and wait their turn to feel the cow’s ovaries. At Western, students won’t get near a cow until after they have lined up and felt the pegs -- stand-ins for ovaries.

“Students in this day and age are much more compassionate than maybe they were years ago,” said Bennie Osburn, the dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine at UC Davis. “The students are wanting to assist in helping animals in every way possible. This is a trend that has been taking place, but I would say that most schools have not made as large a comment about it as Western has.”

Gini Barrett is Western’s resident ethicist -- but she is neither a veterinarian nor a scientist. She grew up on a 40,000-acre ranch in Kansas. She has branded cattle, watched as cowboys castrated bulls and revived calves half-frozen to death in blizzards.

But at the age of 32, she rescued a baby mouse, tiny and hairless, that had become separated from its mother in a barn. She raised it on a bottle, and it got her thinking: “If this, the least of creatures, is so precious, what about the rest of them?”

Barrett is a longtime lobbyist for the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Her interest in animals led her to a job with the American Humane Assn., and from there, to her post at Western University. She teaches a mandatory two-year ethics course.

It goes well beyond the traditional questions of when a pet should be put to sleep, or whether it’s appropriate for vets to advertise. One of the topics she considers most pressing, for example, is how animals are cared for on farms. Much of today’s animal rights movement focuses on intensive livestock and poultry production and the cramped conditions that some animals are forced to live in.

If Western’s students decide to work in agriculture, she wants them to understand all sides of these issues. She doesn’t believe farmers will listen to animal rights activists, but they will probably listen to a veterinarian.

“I want veterinarians to feel empowered,” Barrett said. “The silent veterinarian is not what I want.”