RCVS Elections 2002

Kamikaze pilots fly for the honour.

Mercenary soldiers risk death for the dollar.

But perish the thought,

professional suicide for nought,

with no saving grace, only dogma.

The RCVS is: ‘Promoting and sustaining public confidence in veterinary medicine.’ Or so they say on the front of the Register of Members 2001. Can they be serious?

Perhaps, in some peripheral area, the College is ‘promoting and sustaining public confidence’. But when it comes to the core issue of the dietary-induced disease epidemic in domestic pets, the RCVS is doing less than nothing. Let’s be frank about this.

85% of domestic pets over the age of three, according to the Waltham Focus, have periodontal disease at a level warranting treatment. A plethora of chronic diseases accompany the periodontal disease and then there are the acute dietary diseases too — the gastric-dilatation-volvulous, the FLUTD and the immune based diseases which afflict our pets. All of these diseases, it’s well known, are either directly or indirectly attributable to the commercial, processed diets.

Since 1991 Australian veterinarians have been campaigning on this issue and since 1997 around 10% of RCVS voters have supported proposals for a more accountable RCVS — an RCVS that promotes and sustains confidence by addressing the shortcomings of the pet food industry/veterinary profession alliance. But instead the RCVS has stone-walled to the point, I would suggest, the College is complicit in a cover-up.

What’s to be done and where to start? Each of us has the power to inform ourselves and to then seek to help others understand the enormity of a healing profession acting in tandem with the makers of harmful dietary substances (see www.rawmeatybones.com).

Whether in our professional or private lives there’s much we can do to combat the scourge of pet carnivores being forced to consume an unnatural, progressively harmful diet. And at this point in time we can vote on the issue. We can let the RCVS know where we consider its responsibilities lie and that we want action now.

So please vote early, and recruit colleagues to vote early, for a Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons face-saving retreat from the complicity of recent years.