Vet Med & Dog Catchers: When volume becomes the mission (#575)

There was a time when the dog catcher knew every street.

The dog catcher wasn’t just a man with a truck and a looped pole. He was part of the town’s quiet fabric - half warden, half caretaker.

The dog catcher knew which gate didn’t quite latch on Maple Street, which old Labrador wandered only on warm afternoons, which child would come running in tears if their terrier didn’t return by dusk.

He caught dogs, yes. But more often, he returned them.

The measure of his work was not how many dogs he collected in a day. It was how few needed collecting at all.

The Shift

Then the contracts changed.

Municipalities, under pressure to reduce costs and demonstrate efficiency, began to outsource animal control. Metrics appeared. Numbers were needed. Reports demanded quantifiable outputs.

How many dogs did you catch this week?

Not

How many did you return home safely?

How many owners did you educate?

How many fences were quietly fixed?

The dog catcher became a contractor. The contractor became a collector.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the incentives shifted.

A dog returned home didn’t count the same as a dog impounded.

A warning didn’t register on a spreadsheet.

A conversation with a worried owner had no line item.

But a captured dog? That counted.

What Gets Measured Gets Done

So, the numbers went up.

More dogs caught.

More kennels filled.

More reports filed.

And yet, something else began to decline.

Trust.

Neighbors stopped seeing the dog catcher as someone who would help. Instead, they began to see a vehicle to be avoided. Dogs were hidden. Calls were delayed. Small problems became larger ones.

The system, designed to improve control, began to erode it.

Because when you reward volume over quality, you don’t just change behavior, you change values.

The Quiet Parallel in Veterinary Medicine

We are seeing a similar shift in veterinary education.

Over the past decade, there has been a rapid expansion in the number of veterinary schools and the number of students graduating each year.

New models, accelerated programs, distributive training systems, each introduced with the language of innovation, access, and workforce solutions.

And to be clear, there are real needs:

Underserved rural communities

Workforce shortages

Increasing demand for veterinary services

But alongside these legitimate drivers, another force is at work.

Metrics.

Enrollment numbers. Graduation rates. Tuition revenue. Program expansion.

The question subtly shifts from:

What kind of veterinarian are we producing?

To

How many veterinarians can we produce?

The Risk of Counting the Wrong Things

Just as with the dog catcher, what we choose to measure becomes what we value.

If success is defined by:

Class size growth

Revenue generation

Throughput

then the system will optimize for those outcomes.

But veterinary medicine has never been a throughput profession.

It is built on:

Judgment under uncertainty

Technical skill developed over time

Mentorship and apprenticeship

Deep ethical responsibility

These are not easily scalable qualities.

They are not captured in spreadsheets.

And they do not improve simply because more students pass through the system.

The Unintended Consequences

When volume becomes the dominant metric, several things begin to happen:

• Clinical exposure becomes thinner

  • More students, same number of cases.

• Mentorship becomes diluted

  • Faculty stretched across larger cohorts.

• "Practice-ready" becomes a slogan rather than a standard

  • Competence is assumed rather than earned.

• Debt increases while confidence may not

  • A dangerous combination for new graduates.

• The profession fragments

  • As expectations between academia, corporate practice, and independent practice diverge.

In other words, we risk producing more graduates, while quietly eroding the very qualities that define a veterinarian.

The Dog Catcher Revisited

Imagine a town where the dog catcher proudly reports:

I caught 50 dogs this week.

On paper, it looks like success.

But if those 50 dogs represent:

Frightened families

Preventable escapes

Missed opportunities for education

then something deeper has gone wrong.

The system is working exactly as designed.

And that is the problem.

A Better Measure

What if we asked different questions?

In animal control:

How many dogs were kept safely at home?

How many owners were supported?

In veterinary education:

How confident are our graduates in their first year?

How well do they reason through complex cases?

How do they care for animals, for clients, for themselves?

These are harder to measure.

But they are the measures that matter.

Commentary

When you reward volume over quality, you incentivize the destruction of value.

Not because people are careless.

But because systems shape behavior.

The dog catcher didn’t set out to harm the town.

The veterinary school doesn’t set out to dilute the profession.

But when the metric becomes the mission, the mission is quietly lost.

A Final Thought

The best dog catchers didn’t catch many dogs.

The best veterinary schools may not produce the most graduates.

But they produce something far more important:

Veterinarians who are ready,

not just to work,

but to think,

to care,

and to carry the profession forward with integrity.

And that is a number worth protecting, even if it never appears on a spreadsheet.

Commentary - The Story Of Fast Silas

Based on historical anecdotes of 19th and early 20th-century animal control, here is a story illustrating the consequences of prioritizing quantity over quality in public service, followed by the moral.

In the town of Oakhaven, the city council decided to tackle the issue of stray dogs. They hired a man named Silas, paying him a flat fee for every dog delivered to the pound, with no regard for whether the dog was dangerous, sick, or a beloved family pet.

Silas, wanting to maximize his earnings with minimal effort, stopped hunting for truly vicious strays. Instead, he developed a system: he waited near the park in the mornings, snapping up any puppy that wandered five feet from its owner, and snatched well-behaved dogs sunning themselves on front porches. The city was filled with happy, healthy, innocent pets, but Silas’s ledger showed a high number of captures, so he was considered a success.

Eventually, the town became quiet, but it was a miserable quiet. Neighbors stopped letting their dogs out, children cried for their stolen pets, and the pound was overflowing with "innocent dogs" waiting to be sold or euthanized. Silas made a lot of money, but he was despised by the community. Finally, after snatching the Mayor's dog, the townspeople rose up, demanded a change in the compensation structure to a salary-based system, and ran Silas out of town.

The Moral:

When you reward volume over quality, you incentivize the destruction of value.

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