Veterinary Challenges

As far as I’ve heard, veterinarians nowdays have many challenges to face, but most of them (technology supplies, social matters, education, etc) are derived from a main problem: People don’t respect veterinarians. Veterinary isn’t really taken seriously as a profession, nor animal welfare. For example, when I talk to my family about some animal diseases or treatment, often the answer is “ In that case, you should just buy another dog!” You should see the face I make, and theirs when I told them I was going go study Veterinary Medicine. Since I haven’t had a cat or dog myself, I really don’t know what people expect from a vet consult, but teachers and classmates say that people wants a healthy pet, and they want it for free. They think a pet health is a given, and if it’s not healthy, you should just get rid of it instead of wasting your money on a disease that may never recover. Maybe we still need to evolve a bit further to accept that animals need the same care as us.
That’s why, going back with the homework subject, there are several issues with vet practice: vets don’t get paid that much even if they treat the same diseases as humans, and because of that they can’t get proper equipment (or it hasn’t been developed for animals yet). A vet has lower status compared to other professions in the health area, even if getting the title its just as hard as any other(and it’s more than just one species to study!). Furthermore, many people enter veterinary for all the wrong reasons: they simply like animals, they think is an easy career and/or they couldn’t make it to human medicine or dentistry. Let’s be realistic: it’s quite common to see people dropping veterinary at first or second semester to change careers, not to mention people “freezing” the career because of stress. I’m saying that veterinary is doomed: people are caring more about animals each day, so maybe when people consider animals more important than now, us (future) vets we will be considered more important too.

(By the way miss, i forgot to tell you that Andrés and I had a Bovine practice last Tuesday morning, so we couldn’t make it to class. Sorry for not telling you sooner!)