True, the pet industry is horrible, the farming industry is equally destructive to animals in other ways, factory farming is the reason why knowledge of poultry and livestock care has been disappearing and why farm animal welfare has suffered, small farms have an interest in the welfare of their animals, when an animal got sick it was treated if it was something treatable, now the answer is to cull even for something benign because it isn’t cost effective to treat several hundred hens, turkeys, or whatever for something benign.
I’ve seen veterinary medicine suffer as a result of it. All of the vets I knew growing up were brilliant, but that generation has been retiring and it’s hard to find the old “farm vets” anymore, and every vet was a farm vet, the last several years I’ve had the misfortune to encounter the worst kinds of people that happen to be vets, many of them cons too. most of the vets coming out of the veterinary colleges won’t see poultry or livestock now, only cats and dogs, and on top of that several in my area refuse to even see large dog breeds now.
The latest bizarre thing I’ve seen is vets advertise themselves as “farm vets” for business, but they won’t actually see most farm animals, usually they’ll only see horses but there’s one in my county that only treats goats, but not just any goat, she only works with pygmy goats.
