by Seventeen years ago I asked whether every veterinarian should be required to be a vegetarian. The question has sharpened since then. The right word now is vegan, because the line between dairy cow and veal calf is no longer plausibly deniable, and because the climate science on animal agriculture has overrun the old fence between eggs and the slaughterhouse. The provocation in 2009 was short, almost a snapshot of a paradox. A profession that swears to relieve animal suffering, going home from the clinic and ordering bacon. The post received twelve comments, a few sympathetic, a few cautious, and then it slept on the page while the world kept slaughtering animals at industrial scale. The question never left me.
Here is what happened the year after I published the original piece, and I had no idea about it at the time. The American Veterinary Medical Association revised the Veterinarian’s Oath in December 2010. They added the words “and welfare” after “animal health.” They added “prevention and” before “relief of animal suffering.” Every veterinarian sworn into the profession after that revision now pledges to use their scientific knowledge and skills for the protection of animal health and welfare, and for the prevention and relief of animal suffering. That is the language. That is the promise. And the AVMA itself, in its eight Animal Welfare Principles, then immediately undercuts the promise with a doctrinal carve-out so cynical it deserves to be read aloud at every veterinary commencement: “The responsible use of animals for human purposes, such as companionship, food, fiber, recreation, work, education, exhibition, and research conducted for the benefit of both humans and animals, is consistent with the Veterinarian’s Oath.”
The profession swore to prevent animal suffering, then attached a footnote authorizing animal suffering for human convenience. Food is in that footnote. Fiber is in that footnote. Recreation is in that footnote. The footnote eats the oath.
I want to be precise about what I am arguing, because the soft spots have to be closed. The farm veterinarian who keeps livestock alive long enough to be killed for slaughter is performing harm-reduction work inside a system she did not design, and her position deserves a separate hearing. My target is narrower. It is the small-animal veterinarian, the suburban clinic owner, the doctor who saves a Maine Coon on Tuesday and orders a chicken Caesar on Wednesday, who owes the profession an answer. So does the veterinary school that admitted her, the licensing board that examined her, and the oath she swore at graduation. The carve-out for “human purposes” is the door through which the contradiction walks out of the clinic.
The numbers are not in dispute. Survey data across veterinary student populations in Europe and the English-speaking world place vegan adherence somewhere between two and five percent. Roughly the same as the general public. A profession built on a sworn responsibility to animals reproduces the dietary patterns of a population with no such responsibility. There is nothing about veterinary training that produces moral congruence between the work and the plate. That tells you something about veterinary training.
A defender of the status quo will say that personal diet is private, that a surgeon’s lunch order has nothing to do with her competence in the operating room, that we do not require oncologists to refrain from cigarettes or psychiatrists to be free of depression. The analogy fails on inspection. An oncologist who smokes harms only himself. A psychiatrist who is depressed shares a condition with her patients and may even understand them better for it. A veterinarian who eats the species she treats has harmed a third party who never had a vote in the matter. That third party, in another zip code, in another moment of the calendar, would have been her patient. The species was the same. The capacity to suffer was the same. The legal designation was different. The entire moral hinge of the contradiction is a legal designation.
What separates Petunia the pig in a treatment room from a pig on a slaughter line at a Tyson facility in Iowa? Nothing biological separates them. Nothing neurological either. The capacity for fear, pain, and attachment runs identically through both bodies. The difference is paperwork. The difference is whether an owner paid an examination fee. The pig in the treatment room has a client. The pig in the slaughter line has a shareholder. The veterinarian has trained for years to treat the one. She has trained, also, to look past the other. The training to look past is the part of veterinary education nobody puts on the brochure.
The AVMA’s defenders will say that “responsible use” functions as a constraint, that the phrase narrows the permission rather than expanding it. The phrase has done no real work for forty years. Every industry that processes animals at scale already describes its practices as responsible, and the AVMA’s adoption of the same language gives the lobby a vocabulary, not a check. The factory farm sector signed onto “responsible use” before the AVMA did. They were waiting for the profession to catch up.
This argument leaves the obligate carnivore problem aside. The cat eats meat because biology requires it. The veterinarian eats meat because tradition permits it. Those are different categories and should be argued in different rooms.
The forward question, the question I did not yet have language for in 2009, is this: what does a profession do when its own central oath contains a contradiction baked into its founding documents? It cannot continue to recruit ethically serious young people into a structure that asks them to swear an oath in the morning and ratify a betrayal of it at dinner. The contradiction is being felt. Anyone who has spent time with first-year veterinary students has heard the doubt, the embarrassment, the workarounds, the joking about how the dairy cow rotation broke somebody. Compassion fatigue and suicide rates in the veterinary profession are among the highest of any medical field, double the rate of other medical professions and four times the rate of the general population in the most recent cross-national data. Some of that is overwork and debt. Some of it is access to euthanasia drugs and an absence of dispensing gatekeepers. Some of it, I would argue, is the daily collision between an oath and a lunch, though no peer-reviewed study has yet been brave enough to test the variable.
A serious reform proposal looks like this. Veterinary schools should require, in the first year of training, a formal seminar in dietary ethics, taught by the same faculty who teach surgical ethics and end-of-life decision making. The seminar’s task is to require every student to write a defense of her own diet, without advocating any particular menu. Whatever the student eats at the end of the program, she should have to defend her choice in the same language she will use to defend a euthanasia decision to a grieving owner. The profession that asks the public to trust its judgment owes the public a coherent account of its own.
A second reform. The AVMA should remove the “human purposes” carve-out from its Animal Welfare Principles, or replace it with language that distinguishes between purposes the profession is willing to defend and purposes it tolerates because changing them is outside its power. The current document treats food, fiber, recreation, exhibition, and research as morally equivalent, which any honest practitioner knows to be false. A veterinary association that cannot tell the difference between a research protocol with institutional oversight and a factory farm with none has surrendered its credibility on welfare to the food lobby that funds half its conferences.
A third reform, the one that will be hardest to swallow. The next revision of the oath should include a clause on personal dietary congruence. The clause should function as a statement of awareness, no prohibition involved, no policing of private menus. Something like: “I acknowledge that my own consumption practices implicate the welfare of the species I am sworn to protect, and I will be prepared to give an account of those practices to any patient’s owner who asks.” That clause would do for veterinary medicine what the Hippocratic revisions of the twentieth century did for human medicine. It would replace a comfortable evasion with an uncomfortable honesty. The profession will resist it. The profession should resist it less than it does.
I keep thinking about a small detail in the 2010 revision meeting minutes. The amendment was approved over the objections of some board members who worried about “differing definitions of animal welfare.” That phrase is the tell. A profession that knows it cannot define welfare without indicting half its members has already conceded the argument. It is buying time. It has been buying time since 1954, when the original oath was drafted. It bought another fifteen years in 1969, and another thirty in 1999, and another sixteen in 2010. The next revision is due. The next revision will face a generation of students who do not buy the carve-out, who can read a slaughterhouse report, who have watched the climate science roll in, and who will not accept “human purposes” as a closing argument for the suffering of beings they have sworn to defend.
Petunia is still in the treatment room. Somebody, somewhere in the country tonight, is petting her and telling her she will be fine. That somebody, after the shift, will drive to a supermarket and put a different Petunia in a basket. The contradiction will hold for one more news cycle. It will not hold forever. A profession that wants to survive its own oath will have to put down the fork.
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