Veterinary Medical Ethics

Ethical question of the month — August 2011

A client has been bringing in her 16-year-old Labrador cross for regular checkups every few months for the past year. The dog is bright and alert, but has been slowly losing weight, and suffers from osteoarthritis. The owner wants the dog to be comfortable as it comes to the end of its life. You have taken radiographs to confirm the osteoarthritis and have run some serum chemistry tests which showed no serious abnormalities. The dog eats the senior’s diet that you prescribe and receives analgesics for the arthritis. The dog moves slowly but willingly. The owner is aware that the dog’s days are numbered and worries she won’t know when it is time to end the dog’s life. You reassure her with your standard line that the dog will let her know when the time has come. She calls you in a very distressed state on Saturday morning to say that after the dog’s regular morning walk she found a note on her door from the local humane society. The note says she must schedule an appointment with an inspector because a complaint has been made by an anonymous party regarding her “inhumane” treatment of this dog. The complaint states that the dog is obviously “malnourished and in pain”. The owner is upset, and you sense that she thinks you are partially at fault for allowing her to keep the dog for “too long.” She wants to bring the dog in immediately for euthanasia. You had hoped the last day of this dog’s life would have gone better than this and are annoyed that an anonymous “do gooder” has generated this anxiety in the owner. How should you respond?

Responses to the case presented are welcome. Please limit your reply to approximately 50 words and forward along with your name and address to: Ethical Choices, c/o Dr. Tim Blackwell, Veterinary Science, Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, 6484 Wellington Road 7, Unit 10, Elora, Ontario N0B 1S0; telephone: (519) 846-3413; fax: (519) 846-8178; e-mail: tim.blackwell@ontario.ca

Suggested ethical questions of the month are also welcome! All ethical questions or scenarios in the ethics column are based on actual events, which are changed, including names, locations, species, etc., to protect the confidentiality of the parties involved.

Ethical question of the month — May 2011

A longtime client of yours raises purebred Himalayan cats and over the years has developed an interest in feline nutrition. For many years, she has purchased an exclusive veterinary kitten diet from you which she believes is superior to commercial diets. Recently, she attended a seminar on feline nutrition and learned that the company which sells the specially formulated veterinary kitten diet sells an identical diet at pet food stores under a different name and at a lower price. “Were you aware of this?” she asks. You do not believe this could be true, but assure her you will investigate further. While you are researching this you find a second diet by the same company that is also packaged under an exclusive veterinary label as well as a generic label. You phone the company and are directed to the senior veterinary consultant who admits that in certain situations they do duplicate diets in this manner.

Further investigation reveals that there is nothing illegal in this type of marketing, based on the loose description of “veterinary therapeutic diets” by the US Food and Drug Administration (Canada has no regulations pertaining to this matter). Nevertheless, you are concerned about how the public might view this practice of diet duplication with different pricing mechanisms. You are concerned that selling a pet food as an exclusive veterinary diet when an identical product is available commercially could harm the reputation of the profession. You find this particularly disconcerting because of the well-publicized financial support supplied by pet food companies to veterinary colleges and professional associations. How should you respond?

Comment

“I didn’t become a veterinarian to sell cat food.”

Dr. Alastair Bryson, 1239 Mount Newton Cross Road, Saanichton, British Columbia V8M 1S1

An ethicist’s commentary on duplicity in pet food marketing

The point has often been made in this column that what is legal and what is moral are not necessarily coextensive. I recently read of a car dealership where the salespeople use extremely high-pressure tactics on elderly customers in order to convince them to purchase automobiles they cannot really afford. While not illegal, few of us would fail to see that such a policy is despicably immoral. On the other hand, many jurisdictions still have laws on the books forbidding activities that almost no one would consider immoral, such as eating an ice cream cone in public.

Marketing the identical diet in two different ways, as described in this case, we are told, is not illegal, but it certainly appears to be morally questionable. First and foremost, this practice is blatantly and flagrantly duplicitous. If the diet sold by the veterinarian is identical to what a client can purchase in a pet store for less money, and if the client is being led to believe that there is a difference between the two products justifying a cost differential, this is a clear-cut case of lying for profit, something ordinary social morality perceives as paradigmatically wrong. Equally significant for the veterinarian is the fact that, were clients to learn of this practice, it would inexorably lead to erosion of the trust on which a successful and robust veterinarian– client relationship must rest. For these reasons, it is morally and prudentially obligatory for any veterinarian not to support this sort of, in essence, fraudulent marketing.

The fact that there is “well-publicized financial support supplied by pet food companies to veterinary colleges and professional associations” does not mitigate the above analysis. On the contrary, an investigative reporter would have a field day with that knowledge. One can imagine the headlines: “Veterinarians collude in deceptive marketing for kickbacks to the profession.” Such publicity would lead inexorably to a significant loss of public confidence in the veracity and integrity of the veterinary profession.

If ethical behavior were easy, convenient, and self-serving, everybody, or at least far more people, would behave ethically. Obviously, any veterinarian “blowing the whistle” on the practice discussed would very probably incur censure and opprobrium from peers and from the food companies. (A classic example of this sort of situation is provided in Henrik Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People, where a physician is vilified for making public the fact that the hot springs drawing tourists to his community are, in fact, dangerously microbially contaminated.) On the other hand, as Kant pointed out, the more one is motivated towards an action by self-interest or inclination, the less likely it is that one’s action is purely a moral one. Nonetheless, exposing this cynically fraudulent practice is not only the right thing to do, in the long run it is certainly in the interest of the veterinary community to retain an impeccable reputation for credibility.