Abstract
Death is omnipresent in veterinary education and clinical practice, encountered through contact with cadavers in the anatomy and pathology labs, and with the deaths of patients in the clinical year, most often by euthanasia. Despite this, research on the attitudes that veterinary students and veterinarians hold about death is sparse, and most veterinary curricula address the subject of death inadequately relative to its gravity and to the magnitude of its presence in the lives of veterinarians. This mixed methods study investigates death anxiety, as well as attitudes about and prior experiences with death, in a cohort of first-year veterinary students. The quantitative strand included the administration of four surveys to a cohort of first year veterinary students, while the qualitative strand included interviews with a subset of the survey respondents. Death anxiety in Dimension 1 – Fear of the Dying Process on the Multidimensional Fear of Death Scale decreased significantly from the beginning to the end of the academic year. Themes emerging from qualitative data encompassed factors that mitigated or intensified the students’ reaction to an animal’s death, intense prior experiences with animal and human death, and evidence of conflicting feelings regarding cadaver use in the anatomy lab. This study generated a deeper understanding of veterinary students’ prior experiences with death, and their expectations for and reactions to death in their first year of veterinary education. These results will inform future studies and ongoing curricular development in veterinary education.