Dr. Nedim Buyukmihci is one of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine faculty members who has long advocated for an end to terminal surgeries. The dog lies immobilized, spread-eagled over the stainless steel operating table. With scalpel in hand, the veterinary student performs the potentially life-saving practices learned in the classroom. The incision is made, the blood is sponged away, the edges of cut skin are sewn back together. Hundreds of times each year, the scene has been repeated as third-year students at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine perform splenectomies, gastrotomies, small intestinal resections and anastomosis, cystotomies, nephrotomies and other invasive surgical procedures they will use to save the lives of people's pets.
Students learn a variety of procedures, but each end the same way.
After instructors inspect the abdominal closures, the students complete their assignment by providing Rover with a lethal dose of barbiturates, killing the patient. In some respects, the curriculum change is largely symbolic. Even with terminal surgeries being removed from the core laboratory curriculum for most veterinary students, many UC Davis students specializing in large animal medicine will still have to perform them, and there are still many elective courses in which small animal veterinary students may still perform terminal surgeries on dogs and cats. So this change only means that the school will no longer ask most of its veterinary students to perform terminal surgeries as standard practice. Critics of the procedure claim that not only is the use of live animals in teaching unnecessary and unethical, but also that the participating students haven't always thought through what it is that they're doing beforehand.