Winning a tangible reward for a fulfilling career

When I discovered that I had been awarded the 2024 Dalrymple-Champneys Cup and Medal, I felt elated, incredulous, and profoundly grateful to BVA and countless others for recognising my contribution. I experienced similar feelings back in August 1975 when my “A level” grades confirmed I was going to study Veterinary Science at the University of Liverpool.

The beginnings of my career

My long-held ambition to be a dairy-cow vet was driven by an upbringing in the largely dairy-based communities of north-east Wales, Shropshire and Cheshire, reinforced by witnessing the animal and human misery caused by the 1967 foot-and-mouth outbreak.

However, it was thanks to my inspirational lecturers at Liverpool that I changed paths and ultimately found my calling. The anaesthetists, including Ron Jones and Avril Waterman-Pearson, presented me with a new challenge: the management of pain in animals. This coincided with the 1978 publication of Yoxall’s “Pain in small animals - its recognition and control”, the first paper in the veterinary literature to highlight the importance of animal pain, and to reveal the difference between keeping animals pain-free and comfortable, rather than anaesthetised.

Finding my specific area of research

My specific interest in the welfare of agricultural species involved in biomedical research started thanks to my involvement in laboratory animal care during post-graduate training at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital. This intensified during my five years at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, and continued on my return to the UK through work with animal welfare scientists from the Scottish Agricultural College.

My experiences raised personal concerns that dedicated anaesthetists may, by enabling questionable procedures to be conducted on high-risk cases, be facilitating procedures which were not in the animal’s best interests. These concerns ensured a continued drift towards ethics and large laboratory animal anaesthesia and analgesia, culminating in the co-founding of “EthicsFirst” – a group which works to ensure optimal animal welfare at the leading edge of veterinary clinical practice through the promotion of ethical decision making.

A rare reward

It is often difficult to recognise the benefits of being a veterinary clinical academic, as the rewards are often little more than knowing one has contributed to something good. Ensuring the comfort of animals in studies which subsequently have major consequences for the health and welfare of people and animals worldwide is one source of profound satisfaction. Discovering that one’s efforts to encourage veterinary graduates to be able to recognise and competently manage an animal’s pain are often successful, is another. Life is not always pleasant for animals, so with its raison d’etre being the elimination of animal pain and suffering, I firmly believe that anaesthesia and analgesia is one of the noblest specialisms. I am grateful for the career choice I made and the subsequent fulfilment that it has brought me.

Occasionally, one’s efforts are marked by something more tangible. In my case, it has been the Morpheus award from the European College of Veterinary Anaesthesia and Analgesia, a personal Chair from the University of Edinburgh and now, the 2024 Dalrymple-Champneys Cup and Medal from the BVA. Being only the second veterinary anaesthetist to be so honoured on the cup makes its award even more valuable.

Veterinary career choices

Like the veterinary profession in the UK itself, the challenges facing veterinary undergraduates have changed considerably over the last few decades, and it is unsurprising that many may now see these as unsurmountable and navigate an alternative course. However, I encourage everyone to develop a wider appreciation of what their degree has to offer, and reflect that if a potential dairy-cow practitioner can become an academic veterinary anaesthetist, then suitable alternative paths within the profession probably exist for them as well.