Don't trust easy stories.

Here’s an explanation that clarifies what I mean by that a little bit.

I started listening to veterinary podcasts, made by veterinarians interviewing other bets. There’s one episode I’ve been thinking about semi-frequently since I heard it, which centered on a recent PR trend.

I didn't see these, but apparently there was a flush of local news stories framed like this: veterinarians were taking in the pets of owners who didn't have the funds to provide the care they needed, and took the owner's pet themselves.

A couple of these stories went viral, bc it's outrageous. Veterinarians are professionals that people put so much trust and faith into, the idea of being betrayed by someone in that position is instantly appalling. There were tearful interviews with former owners. It was so sad.

But not only are these stories inaccurate in their framing, the foundation they rest on is much more complex, and not nearly as easily digestible. It's not even necessarily more palatable. But it is absolutely more OBSERVABLE, and by many measures more truthful.

Starting with the moment of transference of ownership: when a vet takes in an animal as a client, just like doctors who work with human clients, they take a Hippocratic oath. They're ethically and professionally obligated to act in the best interest of the animal above all.

When an owner has an animal with a serious injury or issue, involving multiple procedures, maybe even surgery, the vet's obligation is to lead with laying out what the best course of treatment and management is. It's often incredible expensive. Some owners don't have the money.

[CW: pet death in the next tweet, bail here if you don't want to get into hard choices around it]

Sometimes a pet comes in with an injury bad enough, or a condition painful enough, that if an owner can't afford to pay the hundreds or thousands of dollars for surgery or treatment the most humane option is euthanasia.

Veterinarians are people who, in an overwhelming majority, enter the profession because they love animals and want to devote themselves to their welfare. It's one of the most competitive vocational trainings in the country. In order to become a vet, you have to:

- get a BA with all the pre-reqs for vet school, ~4 years
- apply and get accepted to vet school, 4+ years
- take the veterinary licensing exam that allows you to practice veterinary medicine, ~1 year prep
- minimum 2 years clinic work
- specialist training, 2+ years/discipline

The median salary of veterinarians in the US right now is roughly $80K, which is very good. But the number is itself kind of an easy story, because it doesn't immediately cover the time, and get this: the average tuition for four years of vet school is $200,000.

Practicing as a vet entails HUGE overhead: the physical place, adequate, well-trained staff to work for you, expensive insurance, etc. All those factors play in to why it costs money to even let your pet stay at the vet overnight.

So. What happens?

When a pet owner tells their veterinarian they don't have the money for a certain course of treatment, the veterinarian has the option to pursue a less expensive treatment IF, and only if, it is ethically sound to do so according to their oath of practice.

The veterinarian on this podcast episode said that on at least one occasion, when it was ethical to do so to the best of her knowledge, she paid for the room and board of an animal to try to buy a little more time to figure out a course of action. That's an out of pocket cost.

There are also innumerable non-monetary costs. There's the emotional cost of having to weigh these decisions, to engage with the client's high emotions around them, etc. These costs aren't borne by the veterinarian alone, they're also costs paid by the owner.

Given that emotionally and monetarily fraught context, it becomes (to me) much more understandable why owners sign over custody of their animal to a veterinarian when that is presented as an option. It's legal and puts the well being of the animal above all.

Often, custody is signed over with the understanding that the vet will treat the animal — again, as an out of pocket cost — and then find them a loving home. That isn't an instant process and the timeline is unpredictable, and in the mean time the vet is responsible for this pet.

Also in the mean time, often owners get home after signing over their animal, and at some point the question occurs to them: "Why wouldn't the veterinarian just treat my pet while they were mine, if they could have done it for free all along?"

With all of this context, it's easy to see how that's unfair. It's obviously not free. It's also obviously not a clean decision. And by the interviewee veterinarian's own admission, it's TERRIBLE optics, when you get right down to it.

And to make things even more accurate, and more complicated, none of the above touches on the issue of veterinarians being placed in a position where it's emotionally challenging to maintain their own boundaries as, like, a person.

There's a certain category of profession (veterinarian, teacher, childcare provider, health worker) where due to the nature of the work and the stories we culturally tell around this work there is a high expectation of *selflessness as a service* on the part of the professional.

That expectation, that story, seems like a positiveone but it's deeply exploitative. These are professionals, and above that, they're *people.* It is unfair to expect them to give their time, money, emotional resource, mental and physical health, without compensation.

While that pet owner sits there wondering "Why can't the vet give my pet surgery if they could do it for free?," the vet would be within reason to wonder, "Why can't the client understand they were putting me in a position where I have to give up [all those things] for free?"

The EASY STORY here, where this whole train of thought started, is the instinctive outrage at the idea that a veterinarian might be exploiting their client to take their pet. Even with all of the lengthy context above thread, it's still a narrative that carries its own momentum.

"Veterinarian who doesn't love animals" is a strong, compelling, EASY story. It morphs very smoothly into hyperbole. ("Veterinarian who DOESN'T LOVE ANIMALS and won't do EVERYTHING THEY HUMANLY CAN FOR THEM because they are a MONSTER.")

That Easy Story blends seamlessly with other Easy Stories, like the easy story of the exploited pet owner, now heartbroken and legally unable to take back their pet.

Knowing everything above thread, all the stuff the Easy Story brushes aside: Were they exploited?

The answer might be yes, but that IMMEDIATELY leads into a second question, which is: okay, by whom?

Here's where I risk sounding glib.

The Easy Story that went viral is that the veterinarian in these arrangements is the malicious party, and the client is the wronged party.

But with all of this information, what I've been thinking since listening to this episode is that the malicious party is capitalism.

In a dream world*, if the veterinarian's education were subsidized, if the client earned a living wage, if basic human needs like physical + mental health care were free, the monetary cost of these decisions would be a much smaller driving force behind them.

Without the crush of capitalism-driven monetary pressures, people can act more freely. It's much less fraught, for example, for the veterinarian to charge less for a procedure if their built-in overhead is far less to begin with.

And veterinarians WANT to treat animals, as a baseline. Think back to that post outlining the bare minimum requirement for what it takes to be a practicing vet with surgical licensing at all.

Who puts in that kind of time and labor if they're not passionate about what they do? What vet, actually, doesn't love animals?

With all this context, to me, it seems a little absurd to look back at that first Easy Story, that there are veterinarians who are exploiting their clients to take their pets from them.

(Frankly, there are easier ways to exploit people. You could found a big social media company, or product distribution company, or run for a high position of government office in order to use political coffers and influence to line your own pockets. Idk, just spitballing here.)

This is also an unfair way to frame the pet owner, too. After this kind of thread sometimes I see people asking questions that are essentially character aspersions or moral statements, like, "Why did the pet owner even adopt a pet if they couldn't afford them?"

Fine. That kind of question is pretty smoothbrain, but okay. Ask it. But also: WHY couldn't they afford them?

Again, it *feels* glib, but with all this information presented in this podcast, the most accurate, clarifying answer seems to be "capitalism in America."

The pet owner loves their pet. The veterinarian is dedicated to the welfare of animals. THIS is baseline.

Where shit goes wrong is when people look for easy stories because other, often HUGE and circumstantial factors, push that baseline awry in ways that are upsetting.

People are tired and upset. This has been a wildly unhappy year. All of our baselines are way lower and way more fucked up than they would typically be. It's going to be very easy to fall for various versions of that viral Easy Story, in all kinds of places.

We can't afford it.

It takes so much more work to dig in to an Easy Story. If this were an assignment I gave my students, I might nudge them by pointing out that they usually start with open-enders: Why? How?

And if you're someone who habitually asks those questions, I'm sure you'll have noticed that there is no shortage of people who really benefit from not being looked at too critically, who will loathe you for asking.

Sometimes they're also tired and upset; but if someone gets defensive, or derails, or whatever when you start trying to see if the story they want to tell you is an Easy Story, it's worth asking YOURSELF a question:

How are they benefiting from keeping the Easy Story out there?

We're going to be seeing a huge saturation of Easy Stories in the next three months regardless of how this week shakes out. We might even need to fight the impulse to *tell them ourselves.* Don't trust them.

Anyway, one day I'll learn to synthesize these ideas in a way that doesn't require walking through my entire pattern-finding observational process but lol NOT TONIGHT. If you read the whole thing through, thank you!

The podcast I referenced, for people who might be curious, is a technical and pleasantly conversational show called Cone Of Shame, with episode titles like "The Mysterious Belly-Bald Cat (HDYTT)," "Neck Pain In the Screaming Beagle," and "Make this Dog Diarrhea Stop!"

*many countries other than the US exist on some level within this dream world; but lololol not here, not here