We've seen an increase in our traffic following the publishing of our op-ed, Pet Group Focuses on Government, Veterinary Nonfeasance in the June 16, 2023, edition of the Arizona Capitol Times. This article is a brief follow-up for interested persons and our loyal readers.
As I write this, it's been roughly 72 hours since my opinion piece was published by the Arizona Capitol Times. While much of it reflects my personal views on the nature of the problem we face, I also believe based on my conversations that it fundamentally captures most of the same concerns shared by veterinary activists across the spectrum. I believe we all owe particular thanks to the editorial staff of the Arizona Capitol Times for running the piece in the first place. Much of the content and the factual claims I made would likely have intimidated many outlets from touching it with the proverbial ten foot pole. The fact that they were willing to do this somewhat restores my faith in both the Fourth Estate and the overall health of American civic life.
In addition to positive feedback from those in Arizona, I've also heard from individuals in Texas and Florida working similar angles in this space. One individual, a Texan who's already been a participant in this rodeo since the mid-2000s, specifically warned me to expect retaliation from allies of the veterinary sector. During my own Arizona veterinary board hearings years ago, I was suddenly accused of intentionally sickening my own dog to death by none other than Jim Loughead, the then-chair of the Board. This occurred a few weeks after initiating my public records request with executive director Victoria Whitmore. I had also walked out of the meeting in protest of their poor investigative and procedural practices. I've also seen more than a few examples in other complaints of Arizona veterinarians behaving badly and involving the law under questionable circumstances. I wouldn't put anything past these people and neither should you. That's another reason they need adult supervision from society rather than running their own show.
On the bright side, we've seen inbound web traffic from places as far away as upstate New York and Guadalajara, Mexico. After decades of denigration from American veterinarians regarding their competency, I do hope that hit was from a Mexican veterinarian enjoying a good bit of schadenfreude regarding the veterinarians up norte. Hope springs eternal, particularly as I've spoken with two Americans in the past week who regretted not taking their dogs across the border to Mexico instead.
If you're reading all this for the first time, feel free to read through our site. You're always welcome to get in touch.
What's also interesting are some of the other hits we've found shortly after the op-ed went live. We began to see quite a bit of traffic coming from a corporation called Zscaler out of California. It certainly didn't appear to be a bot or an indexing system of any kind, and upon further research, I learned that Zscaler has a contract with the state of Arizona to provide secure Internet connectivity (link). It's also used by corporations in the area, so we'll never know for sure where the traffic was really coming from, but it's not a bad inference.
There's also a reasonable chance we're on the personal radar of current Arizona veterinary board chair Jessica Creager. A while after the Zscaler traffic came through, we had a hit come through, navigate directly to her page on our site, remain there for several minutes, and then back up and start clicking wildly on other writeups on our Regulatory Roll Call faster than anyone could probably read them. Acting on a hunch, I found the address of a Brent and Jessica Creager in the Maricopa County Assessor's Office records; it was in the same very general part of the city, but on the other hand, it was a wide area. If it was her, let's all extend a warm welcome to Chairperson Creager and her colleagues on the Board.
We also got some interesting traffic from the South Mountain area and a bit further north in Maricopa County, both of which were coming from Lumen, a business Internet provider. What else was interesting is that they were particularly interested in the Regulatory Roll Call pages of Jessica Creager, Robyn Jaynes, Melissa Thompson, and Jane Soloman. All four of them have strong ties to the Arizona Humane Society and are clearly identified as such on our site. One of the rounds of traffic also started going through some of our Tails of Woe clicking specifically on entries regarding rescues and spay/neuter outfits. Interestingly, though not conclusively, the Arizona Humane Society has both a South Mountain campus and a Sunnyslope campus north of central Phoenix.
If it was the Arizona Humane Society worried about damage control, they don't have that much to worry about in the complaints. You see, under Arizona law, places like the Arizona Humane Society don't fall under the purview of the state veterinary board. Shelters have historically been exempt from veterinary regulation via legal loopholes and Arizona politicians have repeatedly tried and failed to get that fixed as well (link). Somewhat amusingly, a more recent bill (SB 1394) to reform the Arizona veterinary board would have added "a member representing a humane society" to the board. That's despite the fact that the current vet board has several people from the Arizona Humane Society already and the organization they represent doesn't have to generally follow the Veterinary Practice Act anyway. Shame to those who think ill of it!
That's not to say that there aren't embarassing things relating to the Arizona Humane Society in our records. Obviously the voting records of the AHS-affiliated people on the board aren't great, and most of the people hailing from there probably wouldn't have gotten Board jobs if they had to earn them in a plebiscite; my guess is that at least a couple of them would have been laughed off the stage. There are also at least a couple of complaints that involve Arizona Humane Society staff that make you sit up and take notice. One is 18-05, in which accusations of abuse regarding a dog dying of penile cancer ended up involving both Arizona Humane Society personnel and the Phoenix Police Department's animal cops; while we don't know what really happened there, it really makes you wonder. There's also 21-111, in which an Arizona Humane Society person and star of Animal Cops: Phoenix was allegedly involved in dognapping an obese beagle from a nursing home and subsequently nabbed in an underage sex sting by real cops. As with most subjects veterinary, add Rod Serling and you've got an episode of The Twilight Zone.
Again, it's just been around three days since all this went live. We're still engaged in our outreach, we're still making plans for our next steps, and we're going to be receving yet another batch of 150 or so records in the next few weeks to help us with all of that. We also have some other things planned, so if you want to be a part of it, you know where to find me (milens@vetvictims.org). In the words of AC/DC, pick up the phone or make a social call.
One of the things that I found particularly interesting with some of the aforementioned web traffic is what they didn't usually click on. They were quite interested in the pages about veterinary board members and their colleagues, and they also seemed to have an unhealthy interest at times in the memorial pages of your pets; I suspect they're trying to figure out who you are. They didn't, however, tend to click through to read about what actually happened to your pets, nor did they bother to browse our summaries of the complaints or our library articles talking about the problem. That's one of the reasons I suspect the hits did in fact come from veterinary board members, government apparatchiks, and animal do-gooders; they were worried about how they might look but not so interested in what happened to your family members or what we as a people could do about it.
On the other hand, in the early weeks of this effort I've spoken with many Arizonans who cared deeply about what happened to their pets. They're still in shock, sometimes years later, from the events that transpired and the aftermath of those events. They still have such great love and devotion to family members that, absent divine intervention, they will never again see. I've also heard their desire to make a difference together, to find ways to ensure that the tragedies and violations of the past are not perpetuated into the future, and to find some way to make the deaths of their loved ones not be empty or in vain. The contrast with those on the other side of this divide could not be more clear.