Why Do They Eat Their Patients?
The system that keeps vets from connecting the dots
Have you ever heard this before?
“Vets are the only doctors who eat their patients.”
Offensive? I’m sure many vets would be annoyed by this. True? I’d wager that some farm vets have literally eaten the animals they’ve treated and speaking generally, most vets do eat animals. I don’t think it’s only vegans that find this a little strange, so what’s going on here?
Danny the vet
A British MP stands up in Parliament and makes a heartfelt case for animals. He’s speaking out against animal testing. He talks about fear and distress. How despite being less intelligent, animals experience the world emotionally, not just physically, and that it should matter to us.
He talks about chickens he’s personally treated who were clearly in distress, and makes a direct comparison to how we experience distress ourselves. It’s a moving speech. The clip has over a hundred thousand views so far. And good, it deserves it.
The MP is Danny Chambers, danny_the_vet on Instagram. He’s a vet by trade. He got a bill to stop puppy smuggling passed in Parliament. He clearly cares about animals. He also eats animal products, and supports animal agriculture.
He has posts on his Instagram where he’s eating meals and products containing eggs and milk. He also made a post wishing sheep farmers good luck with their lambing. Lambing, for anyone who isn’t sure, is when mother sheep give birth to lambs who are then slaughtered at a young age for Easter. Danny seems to be okay with the system of breeding, confining and slaughtering billions of, his own words even, sentient animals.
Here’s someone making a beautiful, intelligent case for animal sentience in one context, and completely ignoring it in another. My raw reaction to this was to just call him a hypocrite and stop there. An understandable reaction I think.
But I think the raw reaction ignores something more important. I don’t think this is just an example of personal hypocrisy, the truth is actually a lot darker. I think Danny Chambers, and many vets like him, are a product of a system built to produce this outcome.
Animal lover to animal producer
Why do most people become vets? Probably because they care about animals. I think that’s pretty safe to say. But then, the training starts.
In the UK, every veterinary student has to complete something called Extra-Mural Studies (EMS). It isn’t optional, it’s written into UK law. As part of their studies, students have to do 10 weeks of “animal husbandry” placements. At Edinburgh’s Royal School of Veterinary Studies, one of the most prestigious vet schools in the world, students have to do at least one week of dairy work, and at least one week of lambing specifically is recommended.
Lambing, the thing Danny posted about, is built into the recommended training at the most prestigious school for veterinary training. Are you starting to see the problem? These are people who went into veterinary medicine because they wanted to help animals, but before they’ve even qualified, they’re legally required to work with industries that breed and kill them. And it isn’t just a British thing.
In the US, veterinary graduates have to have skills in “food animal” practice. Schools that don’t teach this lose their accreditation. Across Europe, for many countries food animal training is a minimum requirement for veterinary qualifications. In Australia and New Zealand, farm placements are mandatory. In Canada, vet schools follow similar standards.
Most vets who graduated anywhere in the Western world have been trained to work alongside farmers and view these animals through the lens of production. Not as individuals. As animals assessed by their productivity, their reproductive cycles, their market value. The issue isn’t that farmed animals are treated worse than dogs or cats. The core issue is that they are denied the basic respect of being seen as someone, not something.
This is the unholy alliance at the heart of all of this. A profession built on people who love animals, forced by law, by training, by industry money, to serve the people who exploit animals. In the human context, this would be like med school students being forced to work for businesses that keep people in captivity, use and kill them for profit. I know this isn’t a realistic example, but it’s a similar logic and highlights the disturbing reality of the situation.
Follow the money
It gets even more disturbing when you look into the money. The numbers vary depending on whether you’re looking at veterinary medicines, animal healthcare, or veterinary services, but the pattern is hard to miss. Farmed animals make up a huge part of the veterinary economy.
Globally, animal healthcare is heavily shaped by pharmaceutical sales, with one market report putting pharmaceuticals at around 59% of revenue. These are not separate worlds. Medicines, services, breeding, disease control and production are all financially tied together. Would you like to take a guess at which industry is giving them most of this business?
The UK veterinary medicine market was valued at $2.6 billion in 2024. Farm animals accounted for over 58% of that revenue.
Again, this isn’t just Britain.
In the US, the veterinary medicine market was valued at $13.61 billion in 2024. Farm animals dominated with a revenue share of nearly 60%. Globally, across a veterinary services market worth $145.65 billion in 2024, farm animals account for around 58%.
A profession that attracts people who care about animals has strong financial ties to industries that breed, use and slaughter them for profit.
What this actually does to people
I’m not saying all vets are bad people. I’m saying the system they’re trained in and financially supported by is designed to make one set of animals “patients” and another set of animals “production units.” And when you’ve been trained that way, and you’re being paid that way, that becomes your normal. You stop seeing it, and rarely question it.
Imagine you’re a twenty something year old starting a degree to become a vet. Once you find out that you need to train by working for farmers, are you motivated to tear down the system? Or are you more likely to buy into the idea that these are necessary and normal things to do to animals, and that you’re helping “feed the country” by making farmers more profitable?
Give up your life’s aspirations, or do as you’re told, follow the rules and get your degree. I think we know what most do, and it’s hard to blame them.
Think about what this vet training would do to your relationship with farm animals specifically. You’d learn to assess their productivity and the economics of keeping them healthy. You’d learn to recommend interventions that keep animals alive long enough to reach slaughter weight, or fertile long enough to maximise breeding cycles. The animals you’re “caring” for are seen as property. Production units. Their lives have a market value, your job is to protect that value and maximise it.
Is it any surprise an animal lover ends up seeing these animals as products after this sort of training? The system that vets live and work in has never asked them to connect the dots. The system gives them every incentive not to connect the dots. It gives a very clear framework: some animals are patients, some animals are livestock. And that framework was built into their training before they ever qualified, reinforced by the industry that funds their profession, and in Danny Chambers’ case, protected by the political environment he now operates in.
So what do we do with this?
I don’t think the answer is to attack Danny Chambers or people like him who speak in defence of animals, but are inconsistent about it. I’ve written before about why the predictable vegan move, “you care about this animal but not that one, you’re a hypocrite”, probably isn’t helpful. I stand by that.
I think a useful thing we can do is keep pointing at the design. If people think this is about individual hypocrisy, their identity tends to get tied up in it and it just becomes about defending themselves. I think highlighting the system behind it all could be a more effective way to spark change. Showing people how they’ve been misled, manipulated and deceived by industries and corporations that simply want to profit from them. It’s more personally rewarding to attack with insults and accusations, you feel like you’re making a difference, but in reality it can make people more entrenched and less likely to listen.
Danny Chambers and many in the veterinary profession have probably thought carefully about animal sentience. They just don’t apply it consistently. They’ve probably never thought about why that is, or the system that brought them to that place. That’s something we can help with.
Have you ever had this sort of conversation with a vet? How did it go?
I know two vets personally. One definitely became a vet because she loved animals (even with the hypocrisy that comes with that as an omnivore) but the other one told me he made a financial decision at school, to become a vet because he learned that one of the jobs a vet is required to do is simply sign off on import/export licences for animal products. He now moves around the country covering vets who are off work/on holiday and mostly what he does is paperwork. And he’s paid damn well for it! He told me most of the vets he comes into contact with are not animal lovers in the sense I would expect them to be. It was an eye opening conversation and I’ve never forgotten it!
"I think a useful thing we can do is keep pointing at the design. If people think this is about individual hypocrisy, their identity tends to get tied up in it and it just becomes about defending themselves. I think highlighting the system behind it all could be a more effective way to spark change. Showing people how they’ve been misled, manipulated and deceived by industries and corporations that simply want to profit from them."
Absolutely great conclusion