Moments before I sat down to write this, the news dropped that veterinary surgeons will no longer be considered key workers when it comes to school places. The ever-shifting sands of covid restriction make life incredibly challenging for those who are trying to juggle work and family – a big enough challenge in usual times. In most countries veterinary surgeons have been considered as essential from the get-go, since any change that might adversely affect animal welfare has been considered a restriction too far. In the UK, our profession has been divided: those involved in food production being considered essential, those of us involved in equine practice not essential, but potentially still key? It has all been very confusing, highly changeable and it makes staffing a practice and providing a consistent message to clients virtually impossible. Advice from the leaders of our profession has not always appeared aligned with the advice that is coming directly from government and that is where we find ourselves now with respect to school places. Government advice has been vague at times, perhaps deliberately so, and we trust in our leaders to make interpretations on our behalf. These interpretations have, at times, been questioned.
As equine veterinary surgeons we are a small group, and we work very differently from our colleagues in small animal and mixed practice; there is inevitably a concern that our unique circumstances might be overlooked. Most of us would consider that we can work with very little risk of transmitting COVID-19, but is any risk an acceptable risk? How do we balance the potential risk to human health with the need to uphold the health and welfare of the animals we care for? How much pain or risk of pain does a horse have to be in to warrant examination and investigation? Where there is any risk of suffering, I think we would all attend to horses, even in the dark depths of the current pandemic.
But how much importance do we attach to preventive medicine? How great is our responsibility to those that work in the equine industry who read this journal and whose livelihoods we support? In the early days of the pandemic the government made it clear that equine breeding should carry on and it cannot do so without vets doing their work; work that is not essential to animal welfare. When this latest lockdown was announced it was only hours before there was an announcement that racing would continue, all be it behind closed doors, and racing cannot take place without vets in attendance. How do we square this circle? Can the generic advice for the profession apply to equine vets? Should we show solidarity with our small animal colleagues and dramatically restrict what we do, or should we consider our work more comparable with farm animal work and carry on, because we can do so ‘safely’? BEVAs advice has been softer in tone than that of the BVA and RCVS, which perhaps reflects our unique set of circumstances.
We are professionals and as such we have a professional responsibility to set an example to others, and to practice what we preach. We also have a professional responsibility to show solidarity with one another and with our medical colleagues, whose current tribulations make our own challenges seem trivial. If the practice down the road has chosen not to attend a client, we have to ask ourselves whether it would be appropriate for us to do so? We have been trained to appraise evidence and to make difficult decisions in different circumstances. However, the challenges we face currently are unique and the factors that we as individuals have to consider are very different, making it difficult to implement measures that work for the whole practice team.