New Report of Cruel ‘Rectal Palpation’ Drills on Cows in Pakistani Vet Schools Prompts Urgent PETA Appeal

For Immediate Release:
August 11, 2022

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

PETA has just received a disturbing whistleblower report that students at the College of Veterinary and Animal Sciences (CVAS), Jhang—a sub-campus of the University of Veterinary and Animal Sciences (UVAS), Lahore—and at other veterinary colleges across Pakistan are using healthy, live cows and buffaloes in invasive and painful training exercises. In response, the group sent urgent letters to UVAS Vice Chancellor Professor Dr. Nasim Ahmad and Pakistan Veterinary Medical Council President Professor Dr. Masood Rabbani urging them to adopt Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s recent Islamabad Capital Territory reform prohibiting the use of live animals in testing and surgical veterinary training and to switch to animal-free simulation models immediately.

According to the whistleblower, at CVAS alone, more than 100 students a day use irritant solutions and rectally palpate cows and buffaloes, often forcefully. Two students reportedly inserted their entire arms, causing bleeding. Students also reportedly use artificial insemination rods daily, causing lacerations and bleeding to the animals’ vaginas and cervixes. After their internal organs have been damaged, the animals are auctioned off for slaughter.

“Violating animals’ rectums and vaginas dozens of times a day until their bodies give out, after which they’re sold for slaughter, is barbaric,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA is calling on Pakistan’s veterinary authorities to adopt and nationalize Prime Minister Sharif’s historic Islamabad reform that prohibits live testing of animals in veterinary colleges, and replace all painful, invasive exercises like these with superior and humane simulation models.”

Just last month, Gala, PETA President Ingrid Newkirk, and other representatives of the group held a historic meeting with Salman Sufi (head of Sharif’s Strategic Reforms Unit) to discuss veterinary school reforms and other issues. The meeting followed shocking video footage showing dogs, who had reportedly been kidnapped from the streets, lying in pools of blood and excreta after being operated on without anesthetics, prompting Sufi to announce, “Live testing of animals in vet colleges and industrial complexes is banned from today in Islamabad Capital Territory.”

Among other strategies, the group discussed how to help veterinary schools switch to modern teaching tools, including the Bovine Breeder artificial insemination simulator and the SynDaver Surgical Canine—which allow students to practice critical skills without harming any animals. Other strategic reforms that the group is pursuing potential collaboration with Sufi on include replacing the use of animals in medical training and classroom dissection exercises, setting up a national non-animal research method database, modernizing biomedical research through the group’s Research Modernization Deal, and establishing a school program teaching empathy for animals.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.