Introduction

The following is a brief message from Frederick John Milens III, founder of the Veterinary Victims League.

The Veterinary Victims League is here because the veterinary system and the government are too often not. My own story began during increasingly frequent and unpleasant encounters with the veterinary system in the last years of my late Pomeranian's life, culminating in his death and a peculiar set of interactions with the state veterinary board responsible for regulating it. Like many important and protected professions, veterinarians have a state board responsible for their oversight. In Arizona, it consists of five veterinarians, a cattleman, a veterinary technician, and a couple of well-connected average people who landed an appointment from the governor. This agency represents your pet's only hope against a bad veterinarian, and by law it's stacked with veterinarians and likely allies.

I personally viewed my complaints before them as test cases determining the lower bound on veterinary quality in Arizona, initiating larger public records requests as my complaints went through the system. In my own case, as expected, the veterinarians were considered not only adequate but excellent by the state veterinary board and its investigative personnel. Instead, the board chair, Jim Loughead, suggested I suffer from Munchausen-by-proxy and sickened my own dog to death. None of his colleagues on the board had a problem with any of this. While somewhat surreal even by their standards, the handling of my complaint wasn't outside the norm.

Unfortunately, similar nonfeasance in public office generally appears to be standard operating procedure for their agency. Reviewing the hundreds of public records I received over a year later, it appeared that out of several hundred complaints, the Board generally dismissed about 80% outright. The remaining 20% generally resulted in relatively minor or effectively toothless sanctions, sometimes in cases that would likely shock the public conscience. Penalties for a dead pet can be as low as taking some continuing education or paying a $500 fine, and some veterinarians have been through the system multiple times. These constitute only the incidents that were actually reported to the government and in only a single state. The absolute magnitude of the problem is likely significantly greater both in Arizona and across the nation.

In those same records lurk the stuff of our darkest nightmares, something we call the Tails of Woe: Sudden deaths accepted as the unavoidable cost of doing business, animals awakening mid-castration, burns and broken jaws from routine dentals, fatally misplaced feeding tubes, disconnected anesthesia machines, unavailable equipment, absent staff, botched surgeries, spontaneously-disassembling living beings, threats of euthanasia, beloved pets being shopped to a bevy of specialists having no greater accuracy or efficacy than a tribal shaman. While every complaint may not be accurate or true, it's also unlikely that hundreds of complainants were collectively nothing more than confabulists, idiots, or lunatics.

In fact, I reached out to some of those who had filed complaints with the state veterinary board. They related a similar story of a one-sided agency primarily focused on dismissing complaints and protecting the veterinary profession. More than a few even told stories where they were also blamed for their pet's suffering, either through their own ignorance or negligence. They also grieved for their dead or injured pets, wondering how such a system can possibly work. Several wondered how people who allegedly spent their lives protecting pets could conduct themselves in the manner they do as part of their board activities.

And exactly what kind of people are being put in charge? You can meet them in our Regulatory Roll Call. Most of the people directly responsible are actually well-respected individuals appointed by Arizona governors and rushed through Senate hearings in just a few minutes. It's likely that this esteemed coterie is upholding the standards of veterinary medicine. It's just that their standards are a lot lower than yours, and since they're the ones in the driver's seat, your standards don't matter. Sadly, the same politicians who always trusted us enough to take a life on a death-qualified jury curiously never trusted us enough to take away a veterinary license. Instead they gave us these people.

I invite you to review this site and its contents, not just the Tails of Woe and Regulatory Roll Call but also our Library and Archives and draw your own conclusions. I also invite you to get in touch if you believe it's time for something better. The moral status of our pets is likely the one social issue that unites rather than divides us, yet it hides in plain sight, our behavior conditioned by interests who prefer us to think of pets as wards or property. You may be reading this and agree with the sentiment but feel incapable of making any meaningful contribution, of lacking the necessary background to matter in an era of learned helplessness. Once you see your best friend's ashes on the shelf, you'll find it within you.

— Frederick John Milens III (milens@vetvictims.org)