In the first months of 2013 we have already recorded two further successes in Ukraine. Contracts with two departments in Ternopil and Chernivtsi were signed. In these contracts the university teachers pledged to put an end to all animal experimentation for educational purposes. In return the departments received from us notebooks and various multimedia programs to conduct their teaching without any animal experiments.

Good news from Donetsk: The last frogs doomed to die were set free in a pond.

Donetsk Medical School

In Ukraine it is common, to catch frogs in the wild and to keep them without food in glasses or boxes, often for months, until they are cruelly killed. Students must cut off the head of the conscious animals with scissors. The animals' spinal cords are drilled into. Nerves and muscles are cut out and used for experiments. Tens of thousands of frogs are killed that way every year.

Ten frogs were saved from this cruel fate. The animals were waiting for their death at the Department of Physiology of the Donetsk Medical University, when in December 2012 we signed a contract that obliges the university's lecturers to stop all educational animal experimentation. The frogs had survived the cold season in winter torpor and were released in May 2013.









Now the frogs can enjoy their newly won freedom in a beautiful pond.

Ternopil Medical School

After in 2011 we had supplied the Department of Physiology of the Ternopil Medical School with animal-free teaching methods, now we were approached by the university lecturer Yulia Vadzuk of the Department of Clinical Pharmacology. The head of the department, Ivan Klesh, originally had a sceptical attitude towards humane teaching, and he had wanted to wait and see, how things went at his colleagues at the Department of Physiology. Thanks to their great satisfaction, at the end of 2012 he was willing to switch, too.

On his first visit to the university in January 2013 our Ukrainian project leader, the biologist Dimitrij Leporskij, had to witness the cruel animal experiments that were still conducted there. Many rats were operated on without sufficient anaesthesia.


A rat getting an injection.


Bleeding a rat.


Dissection of two bled rats.


Removal of a rat's adrenal gland.


Pig after gastric surgery. Such atrocities will now belong to the past. Only four weeks later the contract was signed. The department received a notebook from us, surgical models and a number of computer programs. Each year, 105 rats, guinea pigs and pigs will now not be cruelly killed any more.


Professor Stepan Vadzuk and lecturer Yulia Vadzuk with the donated materials. This project was supported by the German animal protection foundation "Tierschutz-Stiftung Wolfgang Bösche".

Chernivtsi Medical School

We had already visited the Bukovina State Medical School in Chernivtsi three years ago, presenting cruelty-free teaching tools. However no contract was made at that time, because the vice rector couldn’t bring himself to decide for that change.

In September 2012 the head of the Institute for Physiology, Prof. Svitlana Tkachyk contacted us. One of her colleagues, Valentina Kurovskaya, and Prof. Alexey Shandra of the Odessa Medical School, with whom we have been cooperating for years, had told her about our project. Prof. Tkachyk is open for the principle of animal welfare and she had already reduced a large part of the animal experiments in her courses to "only" 1,540 frogs per year. As alternative, blood sampling and other harmless experiments on students are used.

The contract was signed in March 2013. The department received a notebook from us and numerous multimedia programs. 1,540 frogs are now being saved each year from a violent death.


Medical students, Valentina Kurovskaya (2nd from right) and Prof. Svitlana Tkachyk (right) with the new notebook and the teaching materials.

Our projects in Eastern Europe are carried out in cooperation with InterNICHE.  

We would be delighted to receive support for our projects in Eastern Europe >>

Further information Overview of the whole project (in German) >> Trilingual Website (German, Ukrainian, Russian)