Читать книгу Leadership in Veterinary Medicine - Clive Elwood - Страница 33

If you were to ask a cross‐section of the general public what the veterinary professions are ‘for’ you might expect a range of responses such as ‘looking after sick animals’, ‘vaccinating and neutering’, ‘diagnosing and treating disease in animals’. For veterinary professionals, the answers might be broader, more specific, more nuanced, and not, in every case, aligned with the view of the profession from wider society. I doubt, for example, that many non‐veterinary professionals would raise ‘protection of the food chain’, ‘farm animal productivity’, ‘racehorse performance’, ‘medical research’, ‘drug development’, or the many other areas in which veterinary professionals practise.

And this is where we run into paradox, contradiction, complexity, and ambiguity. Who, truly, do the veterinary professions serve? Our professional status gives us the right to cause harm to animals (‘acts of veterinary surgery’), which is modified (and contradicted) by the primacy of animal welfare as per the oath. We also have the right to charge a fee for our services and, thereby, serve our own needs. Yet, are we, truly, outside of society? Of course not. As the professions' response to global threats show, human welfare (of both colleagues and society) takes precedent, above the declaration that we serve animal welfare ‘ABOVE ALL’. The profession serves the animals in its care, yes, but it does so with implicit (the social contract) and explicit, legal, permission of human society. Many people are not interested in really understanding the role of the veterinary professional; they are just grateful someone is there to take on the responsibilities on their behalf.

If caring organisations are developed to provide defences against anxieties on behalf of human society, then this raises interesting questions about what the veterinary professions are really ‘for’ at an unconscious level (Armstrong and Rustin 2014). The veterinary professions, generally accepted to be ‘caring’, take on a part of the management of the human‐animal interface on behalf of society at large, and function as a place to hold and contain the associated anxieties. This human–animal interface is itself a place of contradiction, paradox, and pain where the idealism of animals as joint rightful sharers of the space on this earth does not (for most of us) bear critical examination, and where the joys of animal companionship come with, emphasise, and maybe help us to face, the inevitability of human pain, ageing, and death (cheery, huh?). So, even at a basic level, to be a veterinary professional is to wrestle and manage with uncertainties of role and identity. These conflicts and paradoxes may be conscious or unconscious; perhaps this is the water in which we swim?