Rick's Blog

#bunyipsbooksbeyond

Use the menu below to explore "All Posts," or delve into selected topics like "Children's Picture Books", and more.

Veterinary Terminology  is a reflective series about the words veterinarians use. How they arise, how they drift, and how they quietly shape professional thinking. This is not a series about catching errors or enforcing purity. It is about noticing habit, distinguishing precision from convenience, and preserving the language that allows a profession to think clearly. Few words in veterinary medicine feel as harmless, and are as routinely misused, as: Leg . Everyone knows wha

When I look back at 2025, I don’t remember it as a year of shocks. I remember it as a year of   confirmation . Many of the forces shaping the pet industry had been building for years, and in 2025 they became harder to ignore. Capital behaved differently. Regulation became more visible. Consumers revealed their limits. Professionals showed signs of strain. None of this arrived suddenly, but together it marked a turning point. From where I sit, 2025 felt less like an inflection

Veterinary Terminology  is a reflective series about the words veterinarians use. How they arise, how they drift, and how they quietly shape professional thinking. This is not a series about catching errors or enforcing purity. It is about noticing habit, distinguishing precision from convenience, and preserving the language that allows a profession to think clearly. Veterinary medicine is built on language. Not decorative language. Not comforting language. But working langua

Two worlds divided by a single fracture. On one side, vocation, trust, and continuity. On the other, scale, control, and extraction. What breaks in between is not efficiency, but care. This is the lesson-set that doesn’t appear in pitch decks or exit memos, but it’s written all over 2025. Veterinary Medicine Is Not Infinitely Scalable Private equity (PE) entered veterinary medicine assuming it behaved like other service industries: standardize processes, centralize decision-

Veterinary Terminology is a reflective series about the words veterinarians use. How they arise, how they drift, and how they quietly shape professional thinking. This is not a series about catching errors or enforcing purity. It is about noticing habit, distinguishing precision from convenience, and preserving the language that allows a profession to think clearly. Veterinary medicine depends on language in ways we rarely stop to examine. We use words to localize lesions, d

The Texas State Capitol rises from its hill in Austin with quiet authority. Its pink granite dome glowing warmly in the sun. It looks permanent. Inevitable. As if it has always been there. But the stone tells a longer story. The Journey of Value The granite that built the Capitol came from Burnet County in the Texas Hill Country, quarried from Granite Mountain near Marble Falls. It was cut, shaped, and hauled east by rail in the 1880s. Nearly 190,000 cubic feet of stone, each

From the highway just outside Burnet, Texas, the trains don’t look remarkable at first. Long, low cars. Pale stone. A steady, patient movement eastward. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you might think it was just another freight run of grain, gravel, or something anonymous. But it isn’t anonymous. Those cars are filled with Hill Country caliche , scraped from land that took tens of thousands of years to form and only a few weeks to fracture and load. Carriage by

Veterinary medicine has begun to talk about burnout openly. That, at least, is progress. We name compassion fatigue . We circulate wellness resources. We encourage resilience, balance, mindfulness, time off. And yet, year after year, the problem worsens. More veterinarians leave clinical practice. More technicians exit the field entirely. Morale erodes. Distrust deepens. The profession feels strained in ways that no yoga class or wellness webinar seems able to repair. Perhap

Every veterinarian enters a profession they did not build. They inherit it. They inherit public trust. They inherit standards forged through hard cases, sleepless nights, and moral restraint. They inherit a culture shaped by people who accepted discomfort - financial, emotional, physical - because the work mattered. And yet, something unsettling is happening in veterinary medicine. Not because the work has become harder. But because our tolerance for difficulty has become thi

By this point in this four-part series , a picture has emerged: Part 1  asked who really owns veterinary continuing education when corporate logos dominate our conference programs.   Part 2  argued that counting hours  is a poor proxy for competence , and explored what outcome-focused CPD might look like.   Part 3  looked at how corporate sponsorship can quietly narrow the spectrum of care , and how good CPD can reopen it. Now comes the practical question: If we’re serious ab

In Part 3  of this series, I want to explore: How corporate sponsorship can quietly narrow  the spectrum of care, and   How an outcome-focused CPD system can help us reopen  it. Picture this. You’re at a major conference, in a standing-room-only session on chronic enteropathy in dogs. The speaker is excellent, the slides are polished, and the diagnostic workup on each case includes: full lab panel, abdominal ultrasound, GI panel, endoscopy with biopsies, and long-term branded

In Part 1 , I argued that we need to bring the same level of scrutiny to veterinary continuing education (CE) that human medicine has applied to its own system, especially around corporate influence. But even if we solved the funding problem tomorrow, we’d still be left with a deeper issue: Our regulatory systems treat time spent in a chair as a proxy for competence. Even if a participant sleeps through all the lectures! You know the drill: I need 20 hours this year.   I’m sh

Picture two wolves in the veterinary profession. One is Greed . Not always snarling, often well-dressed. It speaks in polished phrases: efficiency , synergy , standardization , scale , shareholder value . It doesn’t announce itself as predation. It arrives as a spreadsheet. The other is   Care . The old, stubborn animal in us. Compassion , craft , continuity . A vet who knows the patient, the client, the staff member’s kid’s name, the way a frightened dog leans into a particu

We drove into Van Horn, Texas,  as we have done once a year for the past eleven years and sat down for dinner in the dining room of the El Capitan Hotel . Built in 1930, El Capitan still carries itself with the quiet dignity of another era. The food is excellent, the wine list carefully chosen, the service warm and unhurried. For us, the El Capitan has become a ritual. Proof that some things endure when care, community, and craftsmanship are valued. Just north of this little

One of the more curious rebuttals to any critique of corporate influence in veterinary medicine is the phrase: You’ve never worked in a corporate practice, so your opinion doesn’t count. It’s a silencing tactic. A way of shrinking the conversation to those already within the system, and by extension, ensuring that dissenting voices remain unheard. But this argument collapses under the simplest scrutiny. You don’t need to have drawn a corporate paycheck to understand the ethic

In veterinary medicine, ownership has long implied responsibility. To call a hospital privately owned once meant that veterinarians - those directly accountable to patients and clients - owned and governed their own workplaces. The phrase carried a sense of professional integrity and continuity. Clients could trust that decisions about their pets were guided by clinicians, not by external investors. Today, the meaning of those words has shifted. To illustrate this point, I w

If you pick up the program for almost any major veterinary conference, you’ll see two things very quickly: A long list of talks that qualify for CE hours, and   A dense forest of corporate logos. We’ve grown so used to this that it barely registers. It goes without saying that pharma, pet-food, diagnostics and corporate practice groups support our education. Of course , we sit through sponsored dinners and branded webinars to earn our hours. But who really owns our continuing

Across nine essays we’ve followed a pattern that has become impossible to ignore: How a profession built on compassion has been quietly re-engineered into a financial product. From the Marvel analogy  in Part 1 - where the Juggernaut of corporate greed gained its strength from the gem of private equity - to the global tour that took us through Australia ,  Europe ,  North America , and  the emerging markets of Asia ,  Africa , and  South America ,  each chapter has mapped a d

Walk into a clinic in Shanghai, São Paulo or Nairobi and the story still looks familiar:the smell of disinfectant, a nervous dog on the scales, a vet with a name badge rather than a corporate lanyard. But, increasingly, the money behind the scenes is changing. In Europe, Australia, and North America, we already know the script: Independent practices pulled into chains, chains sold to private-equity funds or conglomerates, prices and pressure quietly rising. Parts of Asia, Afr

Walk into a clinic in Denver, Toronto or Des Moines and it still feels local . A hand-written note on the whiteboard, a well-worn coffee mug on the desk, a vet who remembers your dog’s first vaccine. But follow the ownership trail and that local practice may now be part of a chain backed by global confectionery money, New York private equity funds, or a Luxembourg investment vehicle most clients have never heard of. As in Europe, this isn’t a simple story of good clinics vers