Animal Rahat attends a conference and encourages a veterinary college in Bikaner to implement humane educational tools and animal birth control training.

In addition to helping India’s working animals, Animal Rahat helps veterinary colleges modernize their teaching methods by encouraging the use of non-animal educational tools and promoting animal sterilization training and ethically obtaining cadavers. At a recent conference held by the College of Veterinary & Animal Science–Bikaner, Animal Rahat’s program manager, Dr. Naresh Upreti, spoke about the importance of adopting humane methods in veterinary education and practice, and he treated final-year students to an interactive session on applied animal welfare in the veterinary profession.

In India, an estimated 1,000 calves are killed every year to teach veterinary anatomy and surgery to students, and countless frogs, rats, guinea pigs, and rabbits suffer and die in college laboratories. Dr. Upreti explained how, instead of harming and killing animals, students can learn from computer simulations, interactive CD-ROMs, films, charts, and life-like models that teach anatomy and complex biological processes as well as—and often better than—dissection, experimentation, and other archaic methods.

Not only is replacing the use of animals with modern technology more humane, it’s also a legal requirement under The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960. Rule 17(2)(d) specifically states that “experiments on animals are avoided wherever it is possible to do so; as for example; in medical schools, hospitals, colleges and the like, if other teaching devices such as books, models, films and the like, may equally suffice.”

In addition to humane education, Dr. Upreti stressed the importance of introducing animal birth control programs so that students can learn how to sterilize community animals and return them to where they were found. These programs will help students acquire surgical and anesthetic skills, such as atraumatic tissue handling, and gain an increased understanding of India’s animal-overpopulation crisis. Creating programs to obtain cadavers ethically is also essential in order to ensure that no animals suffer or die for veterinary courses.

The College of Veterinary & Animal Science–Bikaner isn’t the only school that Animal Rahat has joined forces with to improve animals’ lives. The organization has held workshops at the Bombay Veterinary College as well as the College of Veterinary Science and Animal Husbandry in Orissa, and it has also worked with Maharashtra Animal & Fishery Sciences University, the Tamil Nadu Veterinary and Animal Sciences University, Kerala Veterinary and Animal Sciences University, and the Rajasthan University of Veterinary and Animal Sciences–Bikaner (of which the College of Veterinary & Animal Science–Bikaner is a part) to take steps toward implementing body-donation programs and humane teaching methods.

Interested in helping animals who are in need? Simply click here and make a difference right away.