Veterinary health care spaces are fraught with complex and competing financial and emotional barriers. The costs of veterinary care make necessary medical care untenable for many pet guardians; animals stressed and scared often resist the care medical professionals attempt to provide; and veterinary professionals struggle to provide the best care they can, despite financial limitations and pet resistance, while facing one of the highest professional debt-to-income ratios and suicide rates. Structural speciesist values, I argue, have reduced the value of pet and other animal lives and therefore related health care labor, resulting in an intensely problematic field, which leaves pet guardians, pets, and veterinary professionals under-cared for. Unfortunately, even more demand is put on the strained veterinary field by human breeding trends; increased demand for brachycephalic breeds, like bulldogs, increase the need for emergent veterinary intervention. These failures in health care for our companion species and odd trends in creating less-healthy companions cause me to ask, how does speciesism inflect our understanding of companion species health? How and why do we weaken companion species health in medical care or in (some) breeding choices? Building from my own experience working as an emergency veterinary professional and preliminary research with colleagues, I attempt to understand how speciesist ideologies have and continue to inform companion species medical care. I conclude that health practices in the United States (both in human and non-human realms) are built upon exclusionary practices which can be traced to enduring humanism—resulting in synergistically-related speciesism and decreased health care opportunities for many humans (and their animal companions). As long as these exclusionary politics remain intact, veterinary medicine will likely continue to be a field with limited efficacy and high rates of professional mental illness.
Mots clés : companion species|veterinary medicine|speciesism|health care |humanism
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