Veterinarian Quits, Disgusted With Profession He Once Loved
Matthew WatkinsonAfter eight years on the job, British veterinarian Matthew Watkinson became disenchanted enough with the profession he once worked so hard to join that he quit, wrote a scathing book about the veterinary industry and penned a shocking Daily Mail article -- "Why I'm Ashamed to be a Vet" -- exposing the money-grubbing ways of unscrupulous veterinarians.
"A whole industry has arisen out of squeezing the most money out of treating family pets," Watkinson writes in the article published by the Daily Mail. Watkinson accuses financially-motivated veterinarians of ordering unnecessary procedures, prolonging a sick pet's life with expensive treatments merely to generate higher fees and even researching a pet owner's home address to determine wealth and how much the client could be charged.
"I'm not saying everybody does it, and it's probably not the majority," Watkinson, 32, tells Paw Nation. "But there are people in this profession who do things like that. There are veterinary practices where a vet is given minimum financial targets and has to make a certain amount of money per consult." Pet insurance can be helpful to pet owners in emergencies, says Watkinson, but "it's an easy excuse for some veterinarians to take advantage of the system." And what about a client who owns a purebred dog with a lot of inherited problems? "It's a potential goldmine," says Watkinson.
Unsurprisingly, Watkinson's statements haven't endeared him to his peers. "My [veterinarian] friends are deserting me now because I've criticized the profession," the ex-veterinarian says. The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons denounced the Daily Mail article and implied that Watkinson was doing it to publicize his new book, "On the Destiny of Species: by Means of Natural Selection, or the Elimination of Unfavoured Races in the Struggle for Life." In it, he blasts the veterinary profession for supporting a dog breeding industry that produces purebreds with inherited diseases and physical deformities considered "cute," and catering to sentimental -- a dirty word in Watkinson's book -- pet owners, rather than acting in the best interest of animals.
"I've been accused of doing all this to sell books, be sensational and to make money," says Watkinson, who quit the profession a year ago. "But I'm broke. This was done out of a deep respect for the way that nature works and a compassion for animals."
"In veterinary school, there was lots of 'we can do this' [procedure], but not a lot of 'should we do this?'" says Watkinson. "We were taught almost as technicians," he says. "My ethical training was limited to one afternoon in five years. We're not really taught to think; we're taught to do all these procedures. And they get more complicated each year so we have more options to keep all these animals alive. We fight the powers of nature, really, and what we've ended up with is a lot of diseased dog breeds that couldn't survive without us."
A particular incident from veterinary school still haunts him. He was caring for an elderly dog after the canine (whose story is told in an excerpt from "On the Destiny of Species," below) had one of its legs amputated due to cancer. "It was a really old dog and the prognosis was six months more to live," Watkinson recalls. "I sat up all night with that dog, and it screamed all night. I thought, 'We've only done this to massage the emotions of the owner.' It's an old dog. It hasn't got long to live whether you take the leg off or not and it's just going to cause misery by amputating its leg. If we just put that animal to sleep, it wouldn't have screamed there all night."
For the rest of this troubling story and an excerpt from the book, go to http://www.pawnation.com/2009/12/04/why-one-veterinarian-quit-disgusted-with-a-profession-he-once-r/
In this day and age, the accusations and issues brought up in this book do not totally surprise me. That is one of the reasons I am such an animal lover and try in my own small ways to make things a little better for our fellow "earthlings" by awakening humans to their plight. If You are a pet owner and care about animals, "choose your vet carefully"!
"Animalz Rule",
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