UPDATE: Victory! The Monash Rabbits have been saved!
Behind closed doors at Monash University, students are being instructed that cruel treatment of animals is just routine lab work. The Monash Kills campaign has secretly filmed the shocking mistreatment of animals by staff and students at Australia’s largest university.
Undergraduate science students are not training to be vets or surgeons. But in a lab class, physiology students perform throat dissections on live rabbits. These thinking, sentient animals are anaesthetised and tied down by their teeth and limbs to a steel slab. Undergraduate students, with no experience in surgical technique, are instructed to cut open the rabbits’ throats using unsterilised instruments.
Upon exposing the throat cavity, students perform procedures to measure the animals’ heart rate and pulse. They administer intravenous noradrenaline to speed up the rabbits’ hearts, and glyceryl trinitrate to lower blood pressure. Our footage shows a rabbit breathing faster in response to drugs administered through their throat. When the students leave to get a snack after class, these defenseless animals are killed and thrown into a plastic garbage bin.
This live dissection must cease. It teaches animal abuse, not skills relevant to passing the subject. Students are allowed to watch a video of a dissection instead, yet the majority of students continue to operate on the rabbits.
Dr Andrew Knight, a prominent vet who runs the Humane Learning organisation, states:
“These practical rabbit experiments are not part of student assessment, or a necessary part of their learning experience. Cutting-edge research in the biomedical and educational literature of today shows that equivalent and even superior learning outcomes are achievable by utilising humane alternatives to impart knowledge, clinical and surgical skills.”
But abhorrent use of animals in biomedical education persists. Monash University’s students are the professional scientists of tomorrow, and they’re being taught that sentient animals are empty vessels to be exploited.
Several Monash students contacted us about this disgrace. They bravely wore hidden cameras into the lab and filmed their classmates operating on rabbits and even laughing at the surgery table. This animal abuse must end immediately.
WHAT DO MONASH HAVE TO SAY?
In response to our initial request to end these rabbit killing experiments, Professor R H Day (Chair of the Monash University Animal Welfare Committee) stated that:
“Monash University employs training methods which do not need animals wherever possible. Unfortunately there are subjects and courses in which the use of live animals is unavoidable.”
[our emphasis]
However, Professor Day also stated:
“Students… are given the option of attending a video-based alternative class to accommodate students with ethical objections to live animal use. Students are also informed they will not be penalised or disadvantaged in any way if they choose the video-based option”
[our emphasis]
If an alternative to the killing of rabbits is currently available at Monash University, and this alternative does not disadvantage students in any way, then obviously the killing of rabbits in Physiology 3171 is completely avoidable and the course should be using the training methods which do not need animals.
When this contradiction was pointed out to Monash University, they did not reply. Nor did they reply to the hundreds of students and members of the public sending in letters and e-mails calling for an end to the senseless killing. It seems that the Monash University administrators feel they are above the law when it comes to answering questions about the animal abuse being carried out in their name.
WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?
The rabbit killing classes at Monash University are run by Dr Kate Denton (pictured left) and Dr Roger Evans (not pictured). The ultimate decision to ban this animal abuse rests with the Monash Uni Vice Chancellor Dr Richard Larkins (pictured right). You can voice your opposition to them directly by visting our What You Can Do page.