The Tree of Life/Vet Med

SDN Blog Topic of the Week: "What career path/specialty are you pursuing, and how did you become interested in it?"
 
There's way more to vet med than meets the eye. Most people see vets as one thing - the person who does spays, neuters, vaccines, stops Fluffy from puking (hopefully), maybe retrieves a sock from Mittens' lower digestive tract, and at the end of it all, provides a kind ear and a painless death. (Okay, I know there's also lots of people who view vets as cold hearted money grubbers, but humour me, kay?)

A DVM degree is a tree. You start with the degree, and like a DVM, or a law degree, you branch out. Some people see those branches - maybe Wagger has a heart condition and they get referred to a vet cardiologist. Maybe nothing else is helping their Golden Retriever's horrible skin and they wind up at a dermatologist. Few people understand that vet med has just as many specialties as human med. And we have some of our own too.

Since about the end of second year, I've been on the lab animal vet path. It's a small field with big ramifications. It's not the most cuddly of specialties - yes, this is animal testing for medical purposes. And yes, I  have to be careful who I tell what I'm pursuing. For some people, I just opt to say that I'm specializing in exotics and pocket pets. Sometimes, I tell them I'm going into lab medicine, but I immediately launch into an explanation.

Before I got into vet school, I had sort of settled on public health or some sort of infectious disease research (bacteria are my kind of culture). First year, we had a lecture on lab animal medicine from our lab animal vet at school (who I really can't recommend highly enough as a faculty member and as a vet) and I got to know the lab animal enthusiast in our class - the lovely Red from The Road Less Traveled. I had never heard of it before. It seemed interesting. It called to my desire to work with lots of species, to aid animal welfare, and I liked the tie-in with human medicine. So I sort of stuck it away in the back of my head.

Second year, I applied for an internship with the Canada Food Inspection Agency, which I was hoping to use as a stepping stone into public health. They said "Thanks, but no thanks." I sort of took that as a hint that maybe I should start looking elsewhere. I pulled lab animal med out of my head again and really mulled it over. The more I thought about it, the more appealing it was. Animal testing is not going away any time soon. But as vets, we have the power to make sure it's done right. We can see that their suffering is minimal, and not meaningless. I know the ethics of this field won't necessarily always match with my own, and that's okay. But I don't think there's a field of vet med that doesn't involve some ethical quandaries. Even general practitioners will have pregnant spays, clients that can't pay, convenience euthanasia... The fact that I can't do everything and that some times, there is suffering in lab animal medicine, isn't an excuse to not do anything. I can do something.