The team surveyed all of Canada’s roughly 12,500 veterinarians working in companion animal care as well as food safety and agricultural support from February through July 2017. Some 1,400 practitioners (about 10 per cent) responded; just over three-quarters of respondents identified as women.

Overall, female veterinarians have higher poor mental health outcomes than men

About 30 per cent of women veterinarians reported a history of mental illness, compared with almost 27 per cent for men. Just over 15 per cent of women reported mental illness at the time of the survey, compared to just over 9 per cent for men – a key point, says lead author Jennifer Perret, a veterinarian now completing her PhD with Prof. Andria Jones-Bitton in OVC’s Department of Population Medicine.

“Overall, female veterinarians have higher poor mental health outcomes than men,” says Perret, who works part-time at the Guelph Animal Hospital. “We really need to focus on supports for women.”

The study says caregiver mental health can be improved through wellness interventions such as mindfulness and resilience training and improved workplace culture. The researchers also recommend management skills training, reduced working hours and more support services for veterinarians.

This winter, Jones-Bitton, DVM ’00, was appointed as director of well-being programming for OVC, including implementing training across the college curriculum.

She says veterinarians often find themselves caught between a desire to help animal patients and clients’ inability to pay for expensive diagnosis and treatment. “It’s important that we train veterinary students and veterinarians in the profession to build resilience skills,” says Jones-Bitton, whose research includes studying aspects of communication and other interpersonal skills. “We all need a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives.”

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Martin Haulena, chief veterinarian at the Vancouver Aquarium, directed his rescue team of eight while obtaining the necessary permits and paperwork to bring the young false killer whale back to the aquarium. Local law enforcement and about 180 volunteers helped the team as they worked to stabilize “Chester” and transport him.

“We got him into the pool and he was like a floating log, completely unresponsive,” says Haulena, DVM ’93, M.Sc. ’99. He worked around the clock providing intensive treatment as Chester was fed by syringe and kept afloat using special flotation devices.

Today, Chester is healthy and tips the scales at 300 kilograms. “He’s a big energetic goofball who just loves to play,” says Haulena. As an orphan, Chester became a permanent resident and currently shares his pool with dolphin Helen. He is known for his interactions with visitors and has befriended a little boy with autism who visits frequently — when his human friend arrives, Chester will often race around with him on the other side of the pool windows.

“To me, that’s a terrific example of how important the human-animal bond is for both people and the animals under our care,” says Haulena.

Chester is one of more than 100 marine mammals that Haulena helps rescue each year — ranging from various types of seals to a porpoise and a killer whale — with the goal is of rehabilitating and releasing them back into their natural habitat.

Haulena fell in love with marine animals when he was seven years old and touched a dolphin while vacationing in Florida. “I’m one of those lucky kids who got to do what I always wanted to do,” he says. He worked at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, California, for nine years before arriving in Vancouver.

His routine at the aquarium includes daily rounds to check on any recovering animals and identify new medical issues. Preventive care for the nearly 1,000 species living at the aquarium is a priority: a recent day included a physical exam on a sea otter and a necropsy on a mudskipper.

Haulena says caring for the aquarium’s animals allows veterinarians to study them in-depth, providing knowledge that helps with their rescue work and contributes to better care for animals in the wild. Through his work treating a sea lion with cancer, for example, Haulena and his team developed a method to remotely sedate wild sea lions that have become entangled in debris and garbage. This causes considerable suffering and can be fatal to the animals, and disentangling them from a boat in open water can be dangerous — Haulena is the only veterinarian in Canada able to perform these rescues. His technique, which he’s shared with other rescue groups, has helped save many more sea lions.

Haulena is currently studying the sea star wasting syndrome that is causing sea stars along the Pacific Coast to die off.

“Working with the sea stars has helped me appreciate the diversity of life on this planet,” he says. “As a kid, I thought dolphins were cool. But this work reminds me that all forms of life are so precious, and so vulnerable to what we as humans are doing to them. I’m grateful to be able to do even a little to help them.” – TERESA PITMAN

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The memoir, which won the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award for Non-Fiction and was longlisted for the 2015 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, recounts Peacock’s experiences as the only veterinarian on a 200-km stretch of the island’s Avalon Peninsula. Divided into engaging short stories, the book also touches on his family life, including the challenges of fitting into a new community and starting a family.

After graduating from the Ontario Veterinary College in 1982, Peacock and his wife moved to Newfoundland with the intention of spending two years there — almost 30 years later, they still call the province home.

“It was something that went through my mind really from the first day when I saw the unusual practice I was in, that I wanted to write a book about it,” says Peacock, who is now retired from clinical practice.

His entertaining tales include helping to capture a polar bear in a bingo hall, performing a cesarean section on a cow in a blizzard, dealing with a hallucinating lynx and performing an EKG on a whale in the Atlantic Ocean.

“I wasn’t familiar with treating whales,” says Peacock of that particular adventure. “I had read a book about marine mammal diseases and spent time with whale researchers and fishermen.”

A common theme is the connection between people and animals, and a story about euthanizing a cat is among Peacock’s favourites, despite his wife’s request to exclude it because she thought it was too sad.

“It is quite a sad story but it seems to really touch people,” he says. “It’s a story about kids facing reality better than adults. I think a lot of people relate to that.”

Working with people is also central to being a veterinarian and a component of the book. “It requires an enormous amount of tact,” says Peacock of the job. “It requires an understanding of people more than an understanding of animals.”

Peacock is currently working on his second book and is enjoying his new literary career.

– SUSAN BUBAK

ALSO READ:

Lucky Dog: How Being a Veterinarian Saved My Life (Anansi Press, 2014) by Sarah Boston, D.V.Sc. ’03. When veterinary surgical oncologist Sarah Boston suspects a growth in her neck is thyroid cancer — and then uses a portable ultrasound machine on herself to investigate — she begins a journey through the human health-care system and shares her perspective as an animal doctor along the way. Recalling poignant stories from her veterinary career, this funny and moving memoir teaches us how the human medical world can learn from the way we treat our beloved dogs.

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