Conversations around everyday ethical challenges in small animal practice (in association with AWF)

Every day vets face ethical challenges in practice and yet may not even recognise when they occur. Understanding how our own ethical views, those of clients, our workplace, the wider profession and even society at large influence our approaches helps us navigate through complex situations, while minimising the risk of moral injury.

Moral injury is described as the strong cognitive and emotional response that can occur following events that violate a person's moral or ethical code^[1] . By talking about ethics we can help individuals and teams navigate through these events to help protect against moral injury and improve understanding and communication.

In this session, vets from the charity sector, first opinion practice and referral practice will discuss cases that throw up different ethical issues, discussing how they approach these challenges and delve into the ethical viewpoints that influence them. We will discuss the fundamental difference between animal welfare and animal ethics. While our primary concern should always be to animal welfare, it is important to recognise how ethical views impact our approach.

Topics such as behavioural euthanasia, advanced surgical interventions and the treatment of wildlife all throw up questions about animal welfare and ethics that the panel will discuss.

We all try to place animal welfare at the centre of what we do, alongside contextualising care for individual owners and patients, our own views can be impacted by our own ethical perspectives. It is important to recognise the fundamental difference between welfare and ethics. Animal welfare is about the animal and how they are feeling both mentally and physically, it is a science, it is factual and evidence based. There is a substantial body of literature in existence and models, such as the Five Domains model that we are well understood. In contrast, animal ethics is the term used to describe how humans think animals should be treated. Animal ethics isn’t factual or science-based and is influenced by many factors, including attitudes passed on to us, societal values, our experiences and our knowledge.

It is probably not surprising that colleagues, clients and the wider general public have their own ethical positions that differ from our own. Society’s ethical principles tend to guide the laws that are created, for example the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) makes it an offence for an animal to suffer unnecessarily. It is important that all vets understand the provisions of the AWA and their responsibilities within it.

Different ethical theories exist and usually an individual will have varying degrees of different ethical views that influence our behaviour. Colleagues may be interested in trying the Animal Ethics Dilemma tool created by Peter Sandoe and academic ethics colleagues across a number of European Institutions. It is a thought-provoking introduction to your own ethical views. Visit

https://www.aedilemma.net/home

References

1. Williamson, V., Murphy, D., Phelps, A., Forbes, D., & Greenberg, N. (2021). Moral injury: The effect on mental health and implications for treatment. The Lancet Psychiatry, 8, 453–455. doi:10.1016/S2215-0366(21)00113-9