Critical Review of Dolby’s Learning Animals
The following is a critical summary and response to Nadine Dolby’s Learning Animals: Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Becoming a Veterinarian
As someone who studies philosophy, I am interested in the argument that someone makes and the evidence that they use to support that argument. From that perspective, here is the argument that Dolby makes:
Veterinarians are held up as society’s teacher’s of animals
Veterinarians are not taught to see the whole animal
Therefore society’s view of the animal is incomplete
The way that Dolby constructs this argument is through utilizing frameworks by authors such as Pederson in order show this transition into becoming a veterinarian as a deliberate attempt to erase the sentimentality towards animals:
[McInerney’s] defense of dissection reinforces Solot and Arluke’s (1997) argument that the overarching objective of dissection is not the learning outcomes of cutting open a dead pig to learn about pig biology (and its similarities to human biology) but to be able to replace the sentimentality of childhood feelings toward animals with the detachment of emerging adulthood.(16)
Through veterinary education, students are not asked the hard questions about our relationships with animals, and as such, those students themselves have a fraught relationship with animals that manifests itself as trauma that is not adequately addressed by the educational system.
That is a compelling argument and one that offers an explanation for the emotional distress that many, if not most, students in veterinary medicine face today. In the abstract, it just seems to make sense. But as I wrote at the beginning of this, I am looking at this from a perspective that forces me to ask about the nature of the claim and the evidence used to support that claim. Here is where we start to look at the methodology that Dolby uses: she interviewed 20 students from one veterinary school one time per year over the course of their four year veterinary education. That’s 4 days per student out of 1,460 days of their education, or for all the students, that’s 20 days out of 29,200 days. That represents .069% of their veterinary experience. From another perspective, there are 20 students out of a total of anywhere between 13,000 and 14,000 veterinary students in veterinary education at any one time. So those 20 students represent 0.15% of the total student body. A generally accepted standard is in order to get a representative sample is 10%. Without showing us the math, Dolby outlines her approach here:
I use their stories as the basis for this book to map what happens to these students from the early days of veterinary school to graduation. I reflect on and analyze how their experiences during this period shaped their beliefs and perspectives about animals, their relationship with animals, their views on animal ethics and animal welfare, and their views on the veterinary profession. Through their narratives I write the story of how our society’s primary teachers about animals are schooled: what they learn and do and what is absent, hidden, or simply ignored (6)
From this, we can see that generalizing to an entire student body from the accounts of 20 students is sloppy at best, unless of course there is another agenda at work.
Dolby writes about the “disappearance” of the animal: “Thus, the story, and the through-line, that I expand on in the remainder of this book is one that slopes toward disconnection and eventually, the total disappearance of the animal.” (37) without explaining exactly what this disappearance means. Taken as a hyperbolic statement, we can then back that statement down to see that Dolby is saying that, with some of the previous quotes throughout the book, that veterinary education ignores the sentimental relationship that veterinary students could have with their animals.
There are times when Dolby will make statements like the following that help us to see the background that she is operating from:
Strong emotion was a constant part of these conversations, both for the students and often for me, as I struggled to hear and respect the students, their stories, and realities, while at the same time often vehemently disagreeing with their positions on animal welfare and rights. (27)
From this perspective, a different argument takes form. Dolby claims that she is examining veterinary education from a critical pedagogy lens, but there are times throughout the book when she articulates a different background: one of animal welfare and rights. She doesn’t explain this perspective other than using words like “torture” (44) and “suffering” (22, 119, 136) to describe the activities of the veterinarians on the animals. A different agenda starts to become apparent: veterinary education, through its intentional exclusion of non-clinical relationships with animals, forces veterinary students to suppress their sentimental relationship with animals. This sentimentality would see the inherent violence towards animals that is part of the educational system, but instead it is suppressed and that suppression is reaffirmed and reinforced by educators and peers in veterinary education. Were veterinary students not forced to bury their feelings about the torture of the animals, then those students would not experience the trauma and irreconciliability of their oath to do no harm and the harm that they cause the animals. Thus one student in particular is left “to rediscover her own humanity within a system that tries to deny it.” (91) It seems, then, that Dolby is doing more than just saying that educational reform needs to happen, she is saying that veterinary students are torturing animals and causing needless suffering for those animals. That animal suffering then in turn is causing the students to suffer because they are denying their inherent sentimental relationship towards animals. When we look at the evidence that Dolby offers to make these claims, it becomes abundantly clear that she does not have sufficient evidence for the claims. It appears, then, once we see the background of animal welfare and animal rights that Dolby is arguing from, then we see that she is using the students in order to further her own agenda of reforming education without doing the requisite work of explaining just how the actions of the students amount to torturing the animals.
What I’m left with, as someone who was incredibly excited about a critical appraisal of veterinary education, is a book a study that takes advantage of the vulnerabilities of veterinary students in order to further an animal rights and welfare agenda and make claims about the psychological states of those students without sufficient justification. Everyone in veterinary medicine, whether directly involved with the educational system or not, everyone knows that there are wellbeing issues (take, for example, all of the work that Merck does with its wellbeing studies). What we don’t need in veterinary medicine is someone coming into the space under the auspices of a detached, pedagogical perspective who is only trying to further their own agenda and utilizing veterinary students as the prop to support that agenda. We need real change and real reform and it’s not going to come from Dolby’s Learning Animals.
