Aussie Veterinarians Go Hog Wild in Naked Calendar

But it is fun to see someone else do it: for example, the students of the James Cook University Veterinary Science Class of 2015 in Queensland, Australia, who posed nude for their fundraising calendar, Vets Uncovered. The students are trying to raise money for their graduation ball, but, in a show of the maturity gained at university, they’re also donating 10 percent of the proceeds to their region’s Black River and Districts Rural Fire Brigade.

About half the class posed for the calendar, which depicts the naked students in pig barns, horse fields and bison paddocks, their indecent bits hidden by strategically placed chickens, hay bales, cowboy hats, bags of feed and other icons of farm life. Local photographer Vicki Miller not only shot the calendar, she also lent the use of her farm as a set. Other scenes were shot at the veterinary school and other locations around their burg of Townsville.

As, er, perky as the JCU vet students are, they aren’t even the first vet school to do a nude fundraising calendar. They got the idea from a vet school in New Zealand which makes a calendar each year to fund an event for students to celebrate the fact they’re halfway through their degrees. (Do people Down Under just have more fun? We’re inclined to think so.)

The idea was brought across the Tasman Sea by JCU student Angela Davey, who suggested the idea as a joke at a fundraising meeting.

“Most people were fairly hesitant to start with, but over time, we had more and more people gradually get on board,” Davey told Modern Farmer in an email. Once the group got local photographer Miller on board, they put out another call for models and soon had “heaps of students volunteer.”

Leading up to the shoot, most of the participating thought they’d at least get to keep their skivvies on. “We were all thrown a little out of our comfort zones when, for the very first photo, Vicki instructed the students to take EVERYTHING off, and go and stand in the paddock with a bunch of cattle,” Davey writes. But she says that after a while everyone relaxed, and it ended up being a supportive, body-positive experience for everyone.

The calendars are sold for $19.95 AUD (roughly $17 USD), and the group hopes to open up international orders soon. If all 2,000 calendars are sold, the group will raise $40,000. Any extra cash will be donated to the Black River and Districts Rural Fire Brigade.

The group didn’t have any accidents with farm tools or animals, but they ran into another sort of obstacle. “We did have a couple of security guards stumble across the shoot when we were all naked in the sheep yards at uni,” Davey writes.

It turns out the security guards were as charmed by the cheeky students as we are: They asked what the group was doing, and then everyone had a good laugh.