Although I was not familiar with the Alberta decision, it does not at all surprise me. I have long argued that certain aspects of confinement agriculture would conceptually qualify as cruelty were it not for the agricultural exception written into most anticruelty laws.
Leaving a sow with a broken leg untreated until she farrows, as we discussed in an earlier column, knocking sick feeder pigs over the head rather then treating them, shipping downer animals, and keeping veal calves on the edge of anemia provide clear examples.
In this case, husbandry has been completely eroded in favor of productivity. The producer wishes to cut his losses by performing the cesarian on his own, with you providing the drugs for anesthesia.
It is indeed ironic that this ethical question should appear in the August issue of the Journal where we discussed technicians performing veterinary procedures on farms without onsite supervision by a veterinarian. I argued then that relinquishing such procedures to nonveterinarians — even trained technicians — was wrong. If that is wrong, then a fortiori turning a complex surgical procedure over to an untrained lay person is surely egregiously wrong. Not only is the farmer, even more so than the technician, untrained in managing crises, giving him the anesthetics totally trivializes the value of a veterinary education. What you are saying if you do this is that the years you have spent studying anatomy, surgery, anesthesia, reproduction, and so on are in the end insignificant — anyone can do a cesarian. And that is not the proper message to send to promote the value of a veterinary education, particularly, as I remarked in the August column, when some farmers already believe that they can do veterinary work as well as a veterinarian.
For the sake of the animal's welfare, I might be prepared to visit the client and do the surgery at cost, provided that I could also take the opportunity to show the client that the situation is a reductio ad absurdum of industrialized agriculture. If the system the client is using forces the sort of situation described, there is something inherently wrong with the system, and he should think about reconstructing his operation.