I’ll admit that when I picked up Sean Wensley’s veterinarian’s account of animal welfare, I expected some sad stories about mistreated pets and euthanasia, maybe a moving tale of lambing or a funny story about catching chickens. And sure, the penultimate chapter on companion animals has some powerful accounts of the human-animal bond (one man’s devastation at having to euthanise his pet rat hit me hard). But Through a Vet’s Eyes is so much more than this. Wensley may be colour-blind (as he reveals in the first pages) but his eyes are wide open, his perspective on the welfare and wellbeing of domesticated animals penetrating, nuanced and unflinchingly honest.
The marketing of this book has hinged on the idea that, as a veterinarian, Wensley is ideally placed to offer insights into the reality of how farmed and companion animals are treated in the UK. But this has not been my experience of veterinarians in general. As discussed in detail in Nadine Dolby’s Learning Animals, veterinarians (not all vets, but many) tend to put most emphasis on the physical health of animal as a welfare measure, often seeing the Five Domain’s focus on mental wellbeing and ability to express natural behaviours as sentimental (or anthropomorphic) and less important so long as the animal is fed, watered and disease-free. Wensley uses ‘he/she/they’ when discussing animals, never ‘it’, but he cannot be accused of being sentimental: when asked to do a task on the farm, such as teeth-clipping and tail-docking piglets, he knuckles down without complaint. However, he takes time to reflect on the ethics and impacts of such practices afterwards, weighing up the welfare science and often drawing hard conclusions. Leading, ultimately, to this book. After helping disbud a group of young calves so they don’t risk injuring one another when packed closely together, he muses;
It seemed as though routinely mutilating animals was the only way of being able to farm them. What was the justification… ?”
In one later scene, he must castrate a group of lambs without anaesthetic by cutting off the blood supply to their testicles with rubber bands (“They’ll drop off in ten days or so” says the farmer). At this point, Wensley calls this universal farming practice “mutilating” without qualification.
A few years ago I attended an Animal Welfare Foundation (AWF) meeting, a charity led by the veterinary profession. During this meeting, there was a debate about the welfare problems of both intensively and extensively farmed dairy cows which stumped delegates. Not one veterinarian concluded that, given the inevitable suffering of animals in both systems, perhaps we shouldn’t be farming dairy at all. Instead, there was a serious discussion about how to solve the veganism “problem”, vegans presented as a “militant” threat to both the livelihoods of farmers and farm vets. While I don’t think Wensley is vegan or vegetarian (instead he emphasises that he only buys animal products with the highest welfare labels), he doesn’t shy away from questioning how modern farming practices can be justified, nor from offering veganism as a solution to welfare problems. After discussing the suffering of caged hens and the health issues faced by free range birds, he postulates “not eating eggs” as a viable answer. I literally had to read this sentence twice, I was so shocked to see it come from a farm vet. But he goes on, stating that if animals are routinely failed in having their welfare needs met in a particular situation, society has no right to continue to use them in that way. In Chapter 10, Wensley reminds us that “We should not forget that stables are horse ‘cages'” and, given his assessment of the state of equine welfare, there’s little question that he would celebrate the end of keeping horses for human entertainment (that moment when “the Grand National would eventually be run for the last time”). We need to be mindful, Wensley warns throughout, of our animal welfare footprint (and that doesn’t just mean ‘buying British’, a high welfare mythology I was delighted to see debunked in the book).
In fact, there are parts of Through a Vet’s Eyes that share imagery with the narratives of famous animal rights storytellers: his account of visiting a broiler farm recalling Jo-Ann McArthur’s short film ‘Promises‘ and his critique of the health issues of free-range chickens echoing themes in Jacy Reese’s The End of Animal Farming He also cites an argument of Bernie Rollin’s which has always resonated with me: that if animals have simpler intelligence than humans, they may actually suffer more: having no concept of a future where the pain will stop, they live fully in that pain; they are pain. Of course, for many intensively farmed animals, the pain won’t ever stop. I was also struck by Wensley’s easy dismissal of the ethics of hunting, arguing simply that wildlife control should never be “fun” or “entertainment”. Louder for the Tories at the back!
Part of what makes Wensley’s narrative unusual in the context of traditional veterinary accounts of farming is his emphasis on the importance of that fourth ‘Freedom’: the ability of an animal to express normal behaviour. As shown in his beautiful account of feeding and playing with a fox in his garden, Wensley understands and respects the value of an animal’s natural behavioural instincts, as much if not more than physical health. He considers how many farmers hate foxes because they will massacre a hutch of chickens despite only being able to carry off one: yet acknowledges that this is simply natural survival behaviour and the fox cannot be blamed for it. The significance of being able to express normal species-appropriate behaviour is a theme threaded throughout, from the early chapters on caged zebra finches to the later material on laying hens and broilers.
Wensley opens his book by explicitly outlining the anatomical and physiological similarities between human and non-human animals, pointing out that a human histology text is routinely used to study veterinary histology. Throughout the book he develops and expands on what he calls this theory of ‘mammal medicine’: the concept that we aren’t so different from our four-legged relatives. For many, as he gets deeper into the brutality of industrial farming methods and the intelligence of farmed animals (including so-called ‘stupid’ sheep), this idea will become increasingly uncomfortable. What if we kept human mothers in tiny gestation crates for their entire pregnancy, cages so small they couldn’t turn around? If we bred children to grow so fast their legs couldn’t support their own weight? If we allowed huge percentages of our community to limp around with rotting feet, untreated for weeks? If we forced our competitive sportspeople to consume high energy diets that caused them permanent, excruciating stomach ulcers? How, if we can all feel pain, joy and fear, can we justify these practices?
While the emphasis in Through a Vet’s Eyes is on farmed animal welfare, Wensley’s chapter on companion animals is no less penetrating. Yes, it starts with some exploration of the emotional challenges of euthanasia, but the bulk of the chapter continues his critique of societal treatment (or mistreatment) of animals. He describes the deal we make with our pets – to keep them healthy and happy in return for the joy and companionship they bring us – and wonders “whether pet owners are meeting their side of this ethical bargain”. Reading about lack of socialisation and responsible training, puppy farms, pets left alone for five hours or more a day, irresponsible breeding of brachycephalic and other disease-prone dogs and cats, and obesity, one might conclude the answer is a resounding “No”. And that’s before Wensley dives into the welfare of ‘exotic’ pets like rabbits and parrots.
Wensley intersperses his content on the conditions of domesticated animals with accounts of his walks and cycle rides in nature, where he observes wild birds and creatures. This provides stark contrasts: between the heady freedom of the flocks of starlings and the rigid single-file march of sheep and cows to slaughter, or between the violence of the abattoir and the innocent calm of the school wildlife pond. There’s something about these pauses for deep breaths of country air that make the inevitable return to farmyard brutality more of an ordeal. A student of Animal Welfare Science, few of the descriptions in the book were new information for me, yet I still found myself tensing up during the ‘nature’ parts of each chapter in anticipation of the routine horrors to come.
That’s not to say that Wensley’s naturalist passages aren’t compelling; the sheer joy that he finds in the natural world juxtaposed with the realities of modern animal farming reminded me of Phil Lymbery’s writing, in particular Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were. That book introduced me to the UK’s animal welfare issues six years ago and took my life in an entirely new direction, transforming the way I eat, live and think. I have no doubt that Wensley’s book will do the same for many people, vets and non-vets. I particularly appreciated the practical bullet points at the end of his final chapter on One Health, offering people tangible action points for exercising their consumer power to enact positive change. Through a Vet’s Eyes should be prescribed reading in secondary schools: if every young adult knew the truth about where their food comes from and felt empowered to make good choices, I’m certain that the world would look very different for non-human animals.
