One of the notable animal welfare stories to hit the headlines in March was the temporary closing of the Santa Anita Park horse-racing track. The track in California’s Arcadia witnessed the death of over 20 horses in a ten-week period. Santa Anita Park featured in the popular movie Seabiscuit and […]
On March 12 one of our best friends died, after a good, long life, aged 80. John was a local sheep farmer, and one of the first people we met when we moved to Southland and into his farm cottage over 20 years ago. We arrived in Winton for a […]
Popular culture has started to examine the question of whether it is wrong to harm robots. In the series Westworld, the android inhabitants of a Wild West-style theme park are sometimes treated decently by the human visitors. But they are often mistreated and deliberately damaged, sometimes sadistically and immorally. Or […]
The year 2018 brought turmoil to the US veterinary profession, making it a miniature reflection of the turmoil in the US. Mergers and acquisitions Coming off its multibillion-dollar buy in 2017, of the second-largest veterinary hospital chain in North America (Veterinary Clinics of America or VCA), Mars Inc. (yes, the […]
Delegates at the 2017 AVMA meeting asked the AVMA to develop and disseminate information on marijuana as it pertains to four areas: (1) current legal status of cannabis as applied to veterinarians; (2) unified definitions of cannabis and its derivatives; (3) current research on the use of cannabis in animals; […]
