VET ETHICS

Simon Coghlan

has a PhD in philosophy. His doctorate addressed human and animal ethics and he has published in this field in peer-reviewed journals. He has a Masters in Bioethics and a Grad. Cert. in Higher Education. Currently he lectures in Health Ethics and Professionalism at the School of Medicine at Deakin University, Geelong. He is also a Melbourne veterinarian. Arecent paper by Nieuwland and Meijboom argues that veterinary education should be more informed by an ecological perspective. Tradition-ally, veterinary education has focused on animal disease, and to some degree public health, rather than on the many interconnections between human, animal, and environmental wellbeing. They argue that veterinary ethics in particular needs tobecome more aware of these deep links.

Nieuwland and Meijboom’s paper* takes its cue from the new movement of One health. As they remind us, the AVMA defines One Health as “the collaborative efforts of multiple disciplines working locally, nationally, and globally, to attain optimal health for people, animals, and our environment.”

One Health was spurred on by the emergence in recent decades of damaging zoonotic diseases such as West Nile Virus, Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever, Monkeypox, Mad Cow Disease and Avian Influenza. And of course, coronaviruses causing SARS and COVID19 have further raised the profile of pathogens with zoonotic potential, including those that leap to humans from wildlife and domestic animals.

The authors suggest an ecological approach could add value and depth to the teaching of veterinary ethics. This makes sense from their countryís perspective, since veterinary ethics appears to have ahigher profile in the Netherlands than it does in other places. Nonetheless, their position that teaching veterinary ethics is both important in itself, and could benefit from widening its field of interest, is interesting. Historically, vet ethics was mostly about professional ethics and animal ethics. So, the introduction of environmental and ecological ideas about ethics would represent a change. It might also be of interest to students who are becoming more focussed on major issues like global heating and biodiversity loss.

Nieuwland and Meijboom suggest that vet students could benefit from being invited to think critically about the values and implications of a multispecies perspective.For example, they might reflect on whether One Health should be primarily about zoonotic diseases that affect humans or whether it should also include One Welfare --the idea that human welfare and animal welfare are linked in various ways.

For these authors, veterinary ethics and education should take an “ecological turn.” A range of ethical issues are associated with this turn. They write: “If veterinarians already bear responsibility for public health by way of preventing and controlling the outbreak of zoonotic infectious disease, it does not appear far-fetched to attune veterinary moral agency to the upstream (for example, deforestation for the sake of growing crops destined to feed domesticated animals; use of animal research for pharmaceutical or food production) and downstream (emission of CO2, CH4, etc.; impact of free-roaming cats on birdand small mammal populations) ecological considerations of diverse human-animal interrelations.”

In adopting a more global viewpoint, Nieuwland and Meijboom think that veterinarians should become acquainted with the idea they call interdependence. Interdependence means several things. It refers to the fact that there are disease interfaces between humans and nonhuman animals. It can also refer to the fact that human beings are partly constituted by nonhuman organisms, namely those that make up the microbiome.

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