Do YOU Know Your Veterinarian?

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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Bear = Mans Best Man

Thanksgiving dinner 2007

Brutus the Bear - One Man's Best Friend

Talk about bearing witness!

An 800 pound grizzly bear named Brutus served as best man in naturalist Casey Anderson's 2008 wedding to actress Missi Pyle. But this was not a stunt for pun's sake; Anderson calls Brutus his best friend, even telling Good Morning America, "He gives me unconditional love."

Expedition Grizzly, a new documentary airing on National Geographic on Sunday, May 3rd at 9pm EST, captures Anderson living among the bears of Yellowstone National Park, charting their lives and man's impact on their environment.

Anderson first befriended the bear in 2002 when young Brutus' wildlife park became overpopulated. Before the cub had to face a lose-lose fate of captivity or death, Anderson adopted him and opened a sanctuary so Brutus could "act like a real bear."

Of course, "real bears" don't usually eat at kitchen tables and swim in lap pools. But according to Anderson, they do experience human-level emotions, sometimes even shedding tears. Anderson's relationship with his furry surrogate son spawned his mission to dispel false "man eater" stereotypes about Grizzlies.

This is a really cool story. Can't wait to see the tv show this Sunday May 3, 2009. Bears are so intelligent.

Animalz(Bears)Rule,

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Dog & Cat Talk

Akua Christmas Day '08

Many Say They Understand Their Pets

WASHINGTON (Dec. 17) - Stephen King of rural Texas says he has his dog's vocabulary figured out. Molly Thibodeau says her cats comprehend her so well that they get it when she simply points.

Sixty-seven percent of pet owners say they understand their animals' woofs, meows or other sounds, including 18 percent like King and Thibodeau who say they comprehend completely, according to an Associated Press-Petside.com poll released Wednesday. In a finding many parents of teenagers would no doubt envy, 62 percent of pet owners say that when they speak, their critter gets the message.

"I speak to her on limited subjects and she does the same with me," said King, 63, a retired chemist from Kempner, Texas, who says he understands his dog, Dagny's, repertoire of barks signaling anger, eagerness, contentment and other feelings. "Common sense works 98 percent of the time."

The high level of communication is but one way the poll highlights the bond between many owners and their pets. According to the survey, conducted by GfK, only one in seven owners say they have been forced to trim spending for their pets during the past year's recession. More than four in 10 — about as many as last year — are buying holiday gifts for their animals.

More women than men say they and their pets understand each other's verbal stabs at communication. Older and lower-income people are also likelier to cite high levels of comprehension between them and their animals.

Thibodeau, 20, of Fort Riley, Kan., said her two cats understand her so completely that if she wants to shoo them off furniture, "I point at them and they get right down."

On the flip side, men are twice as likely as women to say they and their pets are clueless about what each is saying to the other — a group that overall comprises fewer than one in 10 pet owners.

"It's kind of like, 'What are you doing?'" Edwin Oto, 47, of Moraga, Calif., says of his futile efforts to figure out what his dog, Shilo, wants when she keeps barking after he lets her into the house.
Three in 10 dog owners think their pet is baffled when they speak to it, compared with nearly half of cat owners who say the same about their animal.

When it comes to communicating in the other direction, cat owners do better. Twenty-five percent of them say they completely understand their cats' meows, compared with 16 percent of dog owners who claim to be totally fluent in barks.

But Jane Starring, 48, of Barrington, R.I., says she and her family are confounded by their 8-year-old cat, Flannel, who often chases people about the house meowing.

"We're not sure we're making much progress understanding him," said Starring. "I don't know what his point is."

William Miller, a professor of veterinary medicine and medical director of Cornell University's Companion Animal Hospital, says it's not unusual for many owners and pets to understand some of each other's speech. He said animals and people learn to communicate verbally by over time associating certain sounds with actions, such as a particular bark when a dog wishes to go outside or the soothing tone many people use when petting their cat.

"It's not like you'll sit down and have a U.N. conversation with them" spoken in different languages, Miller said.

With many households having more than one pet, 74 percent of all pet owners have a dog and 46 percent have a cat, according to the poll. Men and women were about equally likely to own either kind of animal.

Twelve percent of pet owners have fish, 7 percent have birds, and 2 percent or fewer have horses, rabbits, rodents, turtles, lizards or other pets.

Just 15 percent of all owners said they have scaled back spending for their pets in the past year, suggesting the recession is prompting many to save money other ways before squeezing their pet budget.

"They look to me for food and shelter just like my children do," said Charlotte Phillips, 40, of Abingdon, Va., a mother of two whose family is cutting its overall spending but not for its two dogs and five cats. "They can't fend for themselves."

Of the group that is cutting back, 27 percent say they have seriously considered giving up their pet. Seventy-one percent say they've thought about buying it fewer toys or clothes, while 60 percent cite switching to less costly pet food.

About half spending less for pets say they've thought about postponing routine veterinary visits and getting less grooming. About one in five have considered delaying care for an animal's serious health problems or cutting day care or walking services.

Even so, 43 percent of owners said they would buy holiday gifts for their pets, compared with 46 percent who said they had done so last year. Dogs would seem to have more to look forward to this season: 48 percent of dog owners but just 28 percent of cat owners say they will buy their pets gifts.

The AP-Petside.com poll was conducted by GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media from Dec. 3-8 and involved landline and cell phone interviews with 1,129 randomly chosen pet owners. The margin of sampling error in the poll is plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.

If YOU are really intune with your pet/animal family member, and, spend time with it as YOU would any other family member, it is quite easy to know and learn what each of YOU are saying to the other. I dont know everything our Siberian says, but, I know quite a bit. As does he. I don't know about YOU, but, if my dog trys to tell me something and I dont understand, "he will look at me as if to say, what are YOU, stupid"?

"Animals Always Will Rule",

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