How do you define a brown horse? (Peech)
…Apparently, it’s one which isn’t predominantly black. Just… let’s say a third black. Or half black. If it’s three-quarters you may be pushing it. It seems ridiculous, but if you get a horse’s color wrong on the identification papers, you could face getting into serious trouble. Like getting sued for half a million dollars, for example.
Thus, into the fourth week of uni, I’m finding that the scariest thing about being a vet is not the threat of injury from patients, or going insane from dealing with irresponsible pet owners. Rather, it’s about being responsible for the lives of others, and then getting sued or fined or prosecuted for slipping up with mistakes. And, of course, facing up to patients dying due to your incompetence (maybe because you keep falling asleep in your physiology lectures!). It’s not all about playing with snuffly puppies and fluffy little kittens and pausing every so often to go swimming in a giant pool of hundred dollar notes. This is a sobering, disquieting thought, which I guess I haven’t really pondered before.
For this reason, I’m going to buck my procrastination habits and study doubly hard this week.
(Okay, so I watched an episode of House tonight, but it had a cat in it! That’s totally legit. Mmm… House.)
It’s more or less the same with Architecture, Engineering and the entire Built Environment field – if we mess up designing a stucture we could get sued and our reps tarnished (forever? hmm…). So it was really quite sombering to hear a guest lecturer in 1st sem of 1st year talk about indemnity insurance, permits, etc.
So if that’s also true with vet sci, imagine what med students are up against…
My argument is that doctors can say, ‘there was nothing we could do’ and generally get away with it. But my impression is that people like to sue vets for the value of their ‘property’… (especially bad if they own racehorses). And the other depressing thing is that some people would rather you put their pets down than spend money on saving their lives. It’s a gloomy thought which makes me want to go into wildlife.
I guess Architecture trumps that though, because if you stuff up you can kick multiple buckets at once! Nothing like being a mass murderer to make people want to not hire you. 😛
(dear potential future students: please note, these are worst-case improbable scenarios. studying vet sci/med and architecture are awesome! /end reassuring disclaimer)