There’s a particular kind of stillness that settles over Pullman, Washington in early spring — the kind that makes you believe nothing much is happening. But walk across the Washington State University campus toward the Veterinary Teaching Hospital and the picture changes quickly. Students in scrubs move with purpose. A hawk is being fed somewhere in the Stauber Raptor Facility. A life-size foaling model named Kenny is being prepped for another round of training. The place hums.
The Washington State University College of Veterinary Medicine has been operating since 1899, making it the fifth oldest veterinary college in the country. That kind of age tends to accumulate both prestige and problems, and lately, WSU’s program has been dealing with a fair measure of both. The college pulls in roughly $49.1 million in annual research spending, ranks third nationally in total federal research funding among veterinary colleges, and holds first place in CDC research funding according to the American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges. Those are not numbers a small regional school produces. There’s real institutional weight here.
And yet the most talked-about story coming out of Pullman recently isn’t about research dollars or national rankings. It involves a recent graduate named Larrea Cottingham, who spent over a year raising internal concerns about what she described as “terminal labs” in the college’s large-animal surgery program — procedures performed on healthy goats and horses, followed by euthanasia rather than recovery. She estimated the practice ended the lives of up to 60 goats and eight horses each spring semester. The horse portion of the course was eventually canceled in March, following email campaigns from animal welfare organizations. WSU attributed the decision partly to hostile outside communications, noting the horse portion was already planned to end after spring. It’s still unclear exactly how long the practice had been operating in its previous form, or how many students passed through without ever being told the full picture.
Cottingham’s concern wasn’t only about the animals, though that was central to it. She argued that students sometimes didn’t know until midway through a course that healthy horses would be euthanized — a gap in transparency she found difficult to reconcile with a profession built on the ethic of care. After she pressed administrators, that information was added to the syllabus. It’s a small change that, depending on how you read it, either reflects responsiveness or reveals how long the gap existed.
What makes this complicated is that WSU’s vet program is also genuinely doing impressive, sometimes moving work. Every spring, injured raptors — owlets, red-tailed hawk chicks, birds that wouldn’t survive without intervention — arrive at the Veterinary Teaching Hospital. WSU is one of the only licensed wildlife rehabilitators in eastern Washington, and the care these birds receive costs between ten and twenty dollars per day per animal. It’s unglamorous, expensive, and mostly invisible to the outside world. The same college that’s facing scrutiny over terminal labs is also the one running a midnight feeding schedule for orphaned birds of prey.
This spring, WSU veterinarians and students fanned out across Washington, Idaho, and Oregon to work with small flock owners living near bighorn sheep habitat, offering free disease surveillance to protect wild populations from respiratory illness. The Field Disease Investigation Unit was involved. So were large animal mobile services. It’s exactly the kind of community-embedded, species-spanning work that Cottingham herself argued the program should be doing more of — using real cases, real animals in need, rather than healthy ones in terminal procedures.
The college’s research portfolio tilts heavily toward infectious disease. A recent study conducted in the Palouse region found that nearly thirty percent of rodents sampled showed evidence of past infection with Sin Nombre virus, a hantavirus capable of causing severe respiratory illness in humans. About ten percent were actively infected. It’s the kind of finding that probably deserves more public attention than it’s received, sitting quietly in academic channels while the broader conversation around the college focuses elsewhere.
There’s a version of WSU’s College of Veterinary Medicine that’s easy to admire — the one running the Jordan Awards, named after its first Black graduate who earned his DVM in 1920, honoring students from underserved communities and posting biographies of trailblazers on the walls of Ensminger Pavilion. And there’s a harder version to sit with: an institution old enough to have built habits that newer programs never acquired, now being asked whether those habits still make sense.
It’s hard not to notice that both versions are true at once. That’s usually how it goes with institutions that have been around long enough to accumulate both genuine accomplishment and genuine failure. WSU’s vet school is not at a crossroads in any dramatic sense. It’s just being asked, like a lot of places, to look at itself clearly. Whether it does that well remains to be seen.
