Anatomists, clinicians and public health experts agree that knowledge of anatomy is vital to safe and efficient clinical practice, and of relevance to meat inspection. With little known about the impact of teaching anatomy to veterinary students; we conducted a pilot study to determine the performance and preference of veterinary students about learning anatomy and their predictors. We administered structured questionnaire to 39 para- clinical and 87 clinical students of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Descriptive statistics and test of significance between categorical variables was done using Fisher's exact test at 5% signifi- cant level. The study revealed that most students (73.0%) passed all anatomy courses at first sitting and that 87.3% preferred Veterinary Gross-Anatomy to either Micro-anatomy or Embryology. The use of combinations of lecture notes, text-books and audiovisuals was highly significant (OR = 20.2; 95% CI 2.4 – 967.1) to passing anatomy at first sitting. In the logistic regression, variables such asstudents' impression about learning anatomy (OR = 5.3; 95% CI 1.4 – 19.5); impression about the pattern of teaching Microanatomy (OR = 0.1; 95% CI 0.02 – 0.4) and adequacy of continuous assessment (OR = 4.8; 95% CI 1.4 – 16.6) remained predic- tors of students' preference for Gross- Anatomy. The use of adequate lecture notes, relevant textbooks and use of audiovisuals in the course delivery is advocated for optimal performance. The learning of anatomy should be driven by an intrinsic interest, allowing students to use learning strategies that are more engaging and cognitive in nature.