Foaming and ventilation shutdown are both nightmare scenarios. Ugh.
Totally...but tough to stomach the alternatives, too (emotional impact of individual culling on a large scale...vs moving away from factory farms, thereby making meat too expensive for a larger chunk of the population near the poverty line.. not good either)
"Limited" licensure like just SA vs LA? Cause I'm all for that
Yep. I believe there have been discussions on these boards before.
If the option for limited licensure existed, the option for comprehensive licensure would exist simultaneously. It would have to, cause in rural areas you may need mixed practices.
In my opinion, it seems fairly straightforward for small animal focused people but for limited licensure to work I think you’d still need to learn everything in school. The issue would be people who 100000% plan to do equine exclusive or food animal exclusive practice during school then a few years later life changes and they need to switch to small animal for the stability/lack of on call/better pay/whatever. If they only took large animal classes and can’t switch what do these people do? Go back to vet school for a couple years? Leave the profession? Feel trapped and become part of the mental health and suicide statistics? Do we force anyone who thinks they want to do only horses to track mixed because so many end up treating dogs and cats? If so how is that any different from making small animal people take the large animal classes? Yeah you could get a mixed licensure and maintain it just on the off chance you switch to small animal in the future but especially if you’re limiting it by solely tracking in one species during school you’re asking someone to choose their entire career projection when they’re 25. What if someone was practicing small animal for a couple years and wants to go do a residency in a “mixed” specialty like pathology or radiology? Are they out of luck because they only did small animal classes during vet school? I think you could argue that derm and ophtho could teach you enough about horse and cow eyes/skin to get by but that wouldn’t work for pathology since we are expected to know about basically every disease for all species. If we were to do limited licensure I think it would need to be a limitation AFTER graduation where you choose the species you’re licensed in and can pay additional fees/show CE to add on others. But overall I’m against it. It’s probably because I’m from a rural area with a relative shortage of vets. If everyone refused to be licensed for exotics or goats or whatever and couldn’t even euthanize one or try to treat, animals could suffer and I’m against that.
Concept or compulsory no kill shelters is another good topic. One county in my home state made it so the county shelter had to be no kill. The county had to shut down the shelter due to the plummeting animal welfare conditions since the only parameters for euthanasia were drastic behavior or health concerns.
Absolutely!
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It actually surprises me how many DVMs *have* brachycephalics... I mean who doesn't think Frenchies or smooshy faced slobbering Pugs aren't adorable? But the farther along in my career I get the more I am against them. It seems very hypocritical.
But I guess to keep going down that road it's probably hypocritical to both save animals (cats, dogs, horses) and eat other animals. For the record, I'm very much a carnivore
Oh man, nobody get me started on controversial shelter topics. I could rail for days about crazy people who think it's acceptable practice to be hoarding behaviorally unhealthy animals for years in a facility that is and always should be considered a temporary housing situation. I have met many animals that I consider absolutely unsafe to release into the general public and who will lead miserable lives full of suffering because of their extensive behavioral problems. It is so challenging to convince people that behavioral health CAN cause suffering and that being physically healthy is not the end-all be-all for animals. Can you imagine spending your entire life being terrified 24/7? Or constantly on edge and actively ready to bite someone 24/7? As someone with multiple anxiety disorders and PTSD I can tell you right now that living with that constant level of physiologic and mental stress as your baseline is truly awful, and I have the benefit of medications and therapy to improve that. We simply don't have as many options and resources available to our animals and I think keeping them drugged enough to just not be able to demonstrate their level of distress is not appropriate.
Me! I hate them and think they're fabulously ugly lol. Have no idea why they are so popular. I do get why a lot of vets end up with them though, I think they tend to be expensive little disasters and often end up relinquished to the clinic and then taken in by staff. At least, that's how most of the veterinarians I know ended up with one.
This drives me nuts too, but done right there are ways to balance it with paying for care of other less expensive animals. The problem is many rescues don't do this and simply rake in donations to dump money into an animal that ends up euthanized because anyone with eyes could tell the prognosis was grave at best from the outset. (I still maintain that if you want to get into embezzling money you should open a rescue, some of these people will fundraise $10,000 and then euthanize the animal with like an $800 vet bill - it's never clear where the rest of the money goes)
I would just like to be involved in the welfare world for *all* dogs. When I was vaguely looking for jobs in the welfare-ish industries, I could not find a dog centric animal welfare position that wasn't solely shelter related. Tried a few emails from when I did the animal welfare competition through AWJAC and it didn't really pan out to anything. And I'm geographically restricted.I caution anyone about getting me started, but feel free to ignore the warning and hit me up for my opinions.
I'm always down lol, my primary interest is animal cruelty investigation and prevention so it's something I very much care about. Also as a bit of an aside, when I was doing my interviews for shelter med internships this year several asked me about behavior cases similar to what was discussed above and were very relieved when I discussed criteria that would personally lead me to recommend euthanizing lol
Yeah, those positions get tricky as the primary place I see people solely work on animal welfare is in food animal
Basically just have to make my own career lol
I feel like a lot of people mean well, but do not consider the other side. A 20,000 ft view would lend one to the big pharma conspiracy, etc. Sure, there was some wrongdoing, and opioids can cause harm, but they're also unbelievably useful, and for me, the only way I can live my life. I have an implanted pain pump that delivers morphine directly to the lesion of my spinal cord via CRI. I also rely on oral opioids to allow me to function alongside anti-epileptics and other medications to manage my nerve pain. I understand the danger, and utilize them cautiously. I know my body is dependent to some degree, but there's a massive difference between dependence and addiction. The current state of opioid demonization has made it increasingly harder for those that need them to get them. I am an advocate for my health, but there are those that aren't adept at navigating the healthcare maze and are legitimately crippled because their pain doctor has no choice but to cut their dosage in half or potentially lose their medical license.
My understanding is that the overwhelming majority of opioid addictions resulting from a prescription are from over-prescribing for acute injuries/surgery recovery. People who are on them for chronic pain are probably often chemically dependent, but when you’re in bad pain and using an appropriate amount to treat that pain, my understanding is that you don’t really feel the psychoactive effects, so people don’t really go chasing any dragons. Meanwhile, there’s sich a bias towards taking pain from acute and visible conditions way more seriously than chronic pain that people are often given way more than they need, leaving them with a bunch of opioids to either “waste” or use once their pain has healed (or at least used to be, I’m not sure how much cracking down on opioid prescriptions has been directed towards these short-term prescriptions vs just making it harder for people who need long-term opioid treatment to get it).
When I broke my arm my doctor prescribed me a crazy amount of percocet, so much so that my insurance wouldn't even fill the full amount by like 30 pills. Even with that reduced amount I still have a lot left over (haven't gotten around to dropping it off at a drug disposal thing) and I can completely see how people can get onto them easily and quickly with those amounts. I tried my best to get off them and onto typical OTC pain relievers since I really only used them for postsurgical pain.
It is in my current state.
Of course, I just decided to step in and offer a viewpoint since this is a thread about controversial topics...pun intended.
As a poultry person I could argue about that stuff for hours and hours 😂 I do feel like a lot of the blame for misinformation about poultry welfare does lie with the poultry industry tho- we need to do a much better job with communicating with the public about how our birds are treated. Cage-free housing leads to huge spikes in chicken cannibalism and don’t even get me started on free range haha. Fun fact: if we wanted to switch over all our poultry houses the u.s. to free-range but keep producing the same amount of birds, we would need an amount of land equivalent to the size of Texas just dedicated to chicken housing in order to accomplish that!
Cynics (including myself) think that's the point of animal rights groups supporting these proposals. It's a long game. They know from a logistics perspective that our current production numbers would be impossible with these "cage free" set ups. It's a step towards reducing the number of production animals in total, with the ultimate goal being the elimination of the animal agriculture industries as a whole in the long term.
The lady who proposed this bill is totally insane, it's farcical that Polis appointed her to the State Board of Veterinary Oversight
I now know what internet hole I'm going down tomorrow!! Lol.
God speed. Multiple pictures of her "protesting" meat sections of supermarkets while holding up those horrible PETA type signs
Oh my dog.
Honestly I feel like people like her and PETA put food animal welfare progress 10 steps backwards. Because now the ag people can just point to crazies like her and say "look! the animal welfare people want to take away all your meat!" and then the conversations about feasible improvements to food animal conditions are lost. Like when PETA protests the use of our live bulldog mascot in his *air-conditioned* dog house during college football games. Just makes it easy to ignore any semi-rational argument they have.
