Chanllenges in your discipline

I will write about the situation in Chile about our career. I think that regarding technology in Chile vets usually don't have enough equipment in their clinics. They just have the basic equipments for "simple" surgeries. And I think that the problem it's no that vets don't want to have more equipments or better clinics, I think that the problem it's that it will be not profitable for them to have such things because there's not many people in Chile that really cares about animal's health and people who has the money to pay for a good attention. And what I just said it's more a problem about social matters. Our society doesn't take seriously animal welfare, therefore they doesn't take seriously our job and our career. But... what can we do about that? first we have to change the way people think about animals, and then maybe they will give us the respect that we deserve.

I will give an example: a doctor ("human doctor") took his dog to the veterinarian. The dog was very depressed and one of the things that the vet did, was palpate to see if an organ was swollen. The doctor laughed for himself, he thought that this way of working was like working blindly, because the vet just could "guess" which could be the dog's problem... but what can we do about it? we should make everytime, like for humans, exams to be really sure about a pathology that our patients have, but if people doesn't care about animal's health, who will pay for such attention??. There are many people like this doctor that thinks that our career it's not important, and in Chile it's not very good recognized by the society. I'm sure that vets in Chile will do anything to help animals, but they also needs, like everyone, to make money, and the technology it's very expensive, so vets can't afford them, if they don't have a good salary, like in other countries.

Regarding education I think that's one of the biggest problem that were facing now in Chile. There are many universities that offers our career... I think there are like 30 universities, and 3 of them or maybe one more are not-private-universities, and the others are very very new private universities. And whats the problem? if there are so many vets graduating every year, there's many of them that can't find job, and also there's a lot of competition, because of the clients that you will have. In general in Chile, "rich people" cares more about animals, and they will always take their pets to the veterinarian, people with not-enough money and who really cares about animals, will think it twice. We need to decrease the amount of universities that we have at the moment, maybe the COLMEVET (colegio medico veterinario) could regulate that also with the government.

So, in my opinion, we have to promote "animal consciousness" in our country, decrease the amount of universities... therefore vets could have better salary and offer better attention with more technology, and our animals will be very grateful for that.