They Can't Make A Living: Sources

 

Here's a short article about AVMA's economic analysis. You can get access to the full report if you are an AVMA member, or pay money for it if you aren't a member. 

This is the link to the USDA Economic Research Service report entitled "Food Animal Veterinarians and the Persistence of Rural Shortage Areas."

Finally, here is the link to an AAVMC report on veterinary school demographics. This link takes you to a PDF of the report.

They Can't Make A Living

 Here is a link to a short news item from a South Dakota media group about a retiring veterinarian who can’t find another veterinarian to purchase his practice. Take a minute to read it. I’ll wait.

https://www.keloland.com/keloland-com-original/parker-veterinarian-to-retire-seeks-successor/

This tale of woe is being told over and over across the U.S. Maybe you haven’t heard this exact tale, but you probably have heard that there is a “shortage” of veterinarians. This is only partially true. There is a dramatic shortage of large animal (livestock and food animal) veterinarians.

According to AVMA, for data collected in 2024, about 73% of new DVM graduates accepted positions in companion animal practices. Around 3% of new graduates accepted jobs working with food animals. New DVMs working in private practice for livestock reported starting salaries that were around $30,000 less per year than new DVMs in private practice for companion animals. Now add in the fact that the average DVM graduated in 2024 with more than $200,000 of debt.

According to AAVMC, around 3,300 DVMs graduated from vet school in the U.S. in 2025. Around 100 of them took private practice jobs working with food animals. One hundred people. Dr. Parker has a lot of competition.

Let’s take another look at Dr. Parker’s situation. He says that his practice has been listed for sale for over a year. He says that he has hosted vet students trying to find one to take over his practice but hasn’t been successful.

Maybe the overall state of the economy is making it harder for new DVMs to finance the purchase of a clinic. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed a lot of small businesses in my area that survived COVID have been closing down in the past month or so.

Maybe his 48-year-old practice doesn’t have modern equipment. New DVMs know that the gold standard medicine that is taught in many large veterinary teaching hospitals is not always easy to reproduce in the real world, but they expect basics like in-house radiography and ultrasound, not to mention a full suite of bench diagnostics to evaluate things like fecal parasites, serology, and blood chemistry and a decently stocked in-house pharmacy.

Maybe he doesn’t have enough support staff. The article doesn’t even include the word “technician.” New DVMs know that providing good veterinary medicine requires a team of trained professionals. In high-volume companion animal practices, you might see two technicians per DVM, plus other technicians assigned to cleaning, stocking, kennel management, and so forth. Plus you will have a front office staff who handles appointments and payments.

Maybe his service radius of 20 miles is too small. Maybe there aren’t enough clients. More likely, there aren’t enough clients who can afford to pay realistic fees required by a modern veterinary practice.

Maybe his willingness to be “on call 24/7 since I’ve been open” is in direct conflict with the demand of new DVMs to have a healthier work-life balance. This is a big generational shift with no easy fix.

By far, the biggest factor preventing Dr. Parker from selling his practice is money. It always comes down to money. His mixed animal practice can’t generate enough revenue for a new graduate to pay student loans, pay support staff, purchase equipment and supplies, and support a family. Few rural practices, even if they include some companion animal clients like Dr. Parker's clinic, can.

These nuances are rarely discussed. They are barely acknowledged by veterinary schools themselves. Better to claim, there’s a shortage of veterinarians so let’s pump out more! Let’s increase class size (diluting the critical hands-on aspect of learning how to practice medicine)! Let’s increase tuition (increasing the already crushing levels of debt that most DVMs have at the end of four years)!

Those aren’t solutions because they don’t address the real problems.

 

Bah! Humbug!

 I don't celebrate holidays. I don't put up decorations or make special food. I don't wear costumes or specially colored or bedazzled clothing. I don't do gift exchanges. I'm not a monster. If invited to a friend's house for a shared meal on a designated holiday, I go, eat, and be appropriately merry. I just don't do anything for holidays on my own.

I don't celebrate birthdays either. I don't buy the dogs special toys or give them special treats. If I want something for myself, I save up money and buy it when I am ready. I don't need to wait for a special day for that.  

In vet school, my classmates had an annoying habit of singing "Happy Birthday" whenever they found out it was someone's birthday. For four years, I lied and told them my birthday was January 1. I chose that day because it reliably fell during the holiday break, so there were no classes, thus avoiding the matter entirely. 

For most holidays, I waver between anger at the false veneer of religion that is slapped on as if that was sufficient excuse, dismay at the empty commercialism, and just not seeing the point. 

Don't get me wrong. I'm happy to have paid holidays from work. I'm like my job but I have plenty of things to keep me occupied when not at work. It would be nice to choose which Monday or Friday I can take off in, say, June, rather than being told, it's this one day. But that's hardly a substantial complaint.

I think that hyping up events that "must" happen on a specific day ends up excluding too many people. In this hyping, the same events are deemed lesser or meaningless if they happen on any other day. People are pressured to participate by peers, family, and corporate overlords. Maybe they can't afford decorations or special food or themed clothing. Maybe they have to work that day. Maybe they aren't Christian. I can't drum up much positive feeling as a result.

Still, I don't make a crusade out of crushing holiday cheer. I just opt out. 

Disappointing

I like science. I like learning about science of all kinds, and the people involved in making and doing those science things. So last night I decided to watch Radioactive, the Amazon film that was billed as a biopic of the famous physicist Marie Curie.

I didn't quite make it to the 30 minute mark. Marie Curie was presented as a person with the social skills, attention span, and emotional maturity of a 12 year old boy. In fact, the entire POV of the movie felt like it was made through the gaze of that 12 year old boy. Jerky scene cuts. No continuity. No character motivation. The sets were either grey or just too damned dark since the average 12 year old boy could easily confuse dim sets for actual, you know, skill in directing, acting, and editing. Marie Curie was uptight and buttoned up until the gratuitous nudity and sex scenes. All in all, a waste of time for an adult looking for a well-told story about an interesting historical figure.

Diary of a Fourth-Year Vet Student: Dealing With the Bodies

All vet students at my school, regardless of their chosen track, spend two weeks with pathologists and pathology residents in the necropsy unit. I just finished this rotation during which I performed necropsies on barn owls, rabbits, dogs, a cat, a sheep, a goat, horses, cows, and a sea lion. We had three sea lions last week and another one this week. I spent two weeks cutting up dead animals, handling their entrails in a modern version of augury.

Necropsies are a systematic examination of the tissues of a dead animal. We are looking for changes in the tissues that might be associated with disease, that might give us a hint as to the cause of death. Sometimes there are no gross lesions (gross meaning we can see them with our naked eye). Sometimes the problems are impossible to miss. But you can't just find the obvious things and call it a day--you have to carefully and systematically examine (look at and often finely dissect) all the tissues to make sure there isn't something else going on that is even more important but less spectacularly obvious. You also have to collect tissue samples for different purposes (bacterial culture, or tissue placed in fixative that will be used to make slides for histopathology).

I did a solo necropsy on a 6-week-old Angus calf this week. Poor thing had severe suppurative pneumonia--his lungs were nearly completely replaced with abscesses filled with thick, greenish pus. After systematically examining all of his tissues and collecting the necessary samples (took me about 45 minutes but I didn't have to collect his brain), I had to dismember him to make it easier to move his remains. And I am here to tell you that even with minimal training and working alone with a single sharp knife, removing the calf's head and four legs completely from his body took me maybe 15 minutes. Someone with slaughter plant experience could have done it in 5 minutes.

Why am I sharing this gruesome information? You may have heard about the terrible ending of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, Turkey. You may have heard he was tortured and dismembered by a large group of Saudis, recordings of which events the Turks likely have, and which they likely have shared with our morally corrupt government officials. It is entirely in the realm of possibility for a single man, let alone 15 men, to kill a man and cut him into smaller pieces in a matter of minutes.

The politics of Jamal's horrific story are beyond my ability or desire to write about in this particular venue. Instead, I want to underscore the physical brutality of what happened to a man who dared to criticize his own morally corrupt government.

I am required to cut up animals as part of my training and practice of the veterinary profession. Every day in necropsy, it was just as difficult to make the first cut as it was to make the last one. Think how morally empty a person has to be to think it is okay to do this to a human being, not done for any justifiable purpose but to remove a political problem.

The house is burning down around us--all we have to do is raise our heads up and look.

More Musings on Vermin

I ended up trapping four black rats, one male the first night, and three females over two more nights. They were identical to the male in appearance but slightly smaller. Then the trap remained empty for about a week even though I baited it each night with delicious, fresh vegan offerings. The depredations on Beast's sprouting grass seeds and my compost bin seem to be at an end for now.

I have recently tackled a new vermin problem: yellow jackets. The bastards are out in force in the PNW during this very dry summer. Archie is normally a fearless little fox terrier, but he is absolutely turned to jelly by yellow jackets ever since he was attacked by a swarm of them. They are so numerous that they are covering my hummingbird feeder ports and driving the birds away too. Time to reduce their numbers, at least locally.

Here is a picture of one of my traps taken this morning. I put this trap out, freshly baited, about 24 hours before this photo was taken.

Here is a picture of the trap taken just a few minutes ago. The blurry bits in the pic are more soon-to-be victims. The bodies mount up and it is so satisfying. Not quite the same level of satisfying as climbing into a freshly made bed, but very, very close.

Not Today, Satan. Not Tomorrow Either.

You might have noticed that the volume of public/media conversations about sexual predators has been increasing in the past couple of weeks. I have some comments to make about this.

As a woman working in a conservative, male-dominated field for nearly two decades, I experienced sexual harassment in all of its overt as well as subtle forms. I fended off most harassers with the direct approach: touch me again or speak to me like that again and I’ll hand your balls back to you on a platter. I had no problems speaking up and went to supervisors and mentors on several occasions when the direct approach was not effective. I was never dismissed or ignored. I had no idea how lucky I was.

I never encountered the more destructive and insidious “Weinstein” style of harassment until last year. Not surprisingly, it was within an academic setting. The academy is as notorious as the entertainment industry for its poor treatment of women. I could single out STEM fields but there are predators in every discipline, not just the sciences.

I first encountered this particular predator via the “whisper network.” Third- and fourth-year vet students would quietly tell the freshman and sophomore students to keep an eye on this guy. He would stand too close. He would say inappropriate things. He would try to touch you. It wasn’t possible to avoid him entirely since he taught a required course for second-year vet students. He’d been doing these things, and much worse, for decades, but few students were willing to jeopardize their grades and degrees by speaking up. While they certainly knew about this, deans and university administrators can’t act on rumors. And although I think one of the charms of the academy is that tenure can shelter eccentricity, the very dark flip side is that tenure can protect predators.  

I was on high alert whenever this predator was in my vicinity, but I was not expecting any interaction with him. I was not his type at all. He is taller than average and I watched him repeatedly use his height to physically dominate smaller female students. That’s what his kind of predation is all about: exploitation of power differentials and domination.

However, to my surprise, he did actually say something to me that was so inappropriate, so shocking, that I went straight to the dean’s office and reported it. I don't view myself as a hero or a warrior. I reported it because I was mad as hell that this kind of gross behavior occurred in my vicinity. I was mad as hell that this fucker had been getting away with this for years. I was mad as hell to think that he could target other classmates, some of whom I’m rather fond of.

The dean did not ignore me or dismiss me. Phone calls were made. Additional meetings were held with other university administrators. I felt like I had been listened to.

As it turned out, I was not only listened to but things begin to happen. At the end of the summer, I was asked to testify before a faculty panel convened by the university president to evaluate the many accusations that had been accumulating around this predator for years and to determine whether he should have his tenure revoked. I was a witness for the outside counsel hired by the university to represent their interests in the matter. Not everyone involved was willing to appear in person, because there was questioning and cross-examination. I totally understand that. First you are afraid that, if you speak up, you will not get approved for a grant, will not pass a class, will not be able to advance in your academic career. Then you are told, we want you to face this fucker and his rude lawyer in a small, stuffy room crammed with people you don’t know and tell your story. That is just too much for most people. However, I am not so easily intimidated. This is not always a good character trait to have, believe me. 

The final outcome is still pending. But I know that I did the right thing by speaking up. The predator has been removed from all duties involving teaching and supervision of students. It’s just a matter of time.

Apoc-eclipse at CircusK9

So on the way home from the store, where I was stocking up on food in advance of the coming apoc-eclipse, I heard on the radio that gas stations in Bend, Oregon, are already running low on gas. Bend is not in the path of totality but it is one of the larger towns in eastern Oregon near that path.
Let's let that sink in a bit. It is Wednesday. The solar eclipse, an event that will last all of a couple of minutes, won't happen until Monday (four days and 19 hours from now according to NASA's countdown clock). The hordes are now descending on Oregon by the tens of thousands, projected to increase to over a million people by Monday. There are only about 4 million of us in the entire state to begin with so that's a lot of extra people: extra mouths, extra cars, extra butts. I read some local news articles about the astonishingly large number of portable toilets that were rented for the occasion by various towns and cities to help reduce the number of people shitting and pissing in Oregon waterways and beaches and deserts.



I live in a town in west Oregon that is in the projected path of totality for the eclipse. I'm treating this like a natural disaster, and stocked up on dog and cat food, cat litter, food for myself, extra water, and of course, gas for the car. I plan to hunker down at home. After hearing the radio reports on the way home from the store, I may go buy a gas container and some extra gas this afternoon.

Don't get me wrong, I fully appreciate the scientific impact of this event, unusual in that the path of totality crosses the entire continent. I saw about 75% of a full solar eclipse in 1990 in Austin, Texas. It was pretty neat. Following instructions on a NASA JPL site, I made a simple pinhole camera so I can safely watch this one. Emphasis on simple, that's for sure. I will certainly celebrate this astronomical event on Monday. But I plan to do it in the calm and quiet of my own backyard.

The Least Amongst Us

I volunteered at Pro-Bone-O in Eugene last Sunday. As always, it was exhausting and eye-opening. And as always, I was humbled to see how people with so few resources do the best they can to take care of their beloved animal companions. 

A guy walked in with a small carrier containing a grey cat. He was probably an Iraq War veteran, was about the right age, had that military stance and carriage even though life had beaten on him pretty hard for quite a few years. He also had a military-style haircut--a lot of veterans keep that hair style for their entire lives. He lives in a tent in one of the homeless encampments in Eugene. This winter has been an endless misery of rain, and I wondered how he was able to cope with that. 

He feeds the feral and stray cats that hang around the encampment, and had noticed that one of the cats was no longer eating regularly. He told me and the veterinarian that he thought she might be sick. 

We took the lid off the crate, and on a filthy towel was an ancient female cat, nothing but five pounds of skin and bones. She was covered with fleas. She had an upper respiratory infection and was having problems breathing. Mucous was coming out of her nose, and her eyes were crusty. A bit of fresh blood was coming out of her anus. She had only a handful of teeth and they were in an advanced state of disease and infection. The tip of one of her ears was cleanly cut off, a sign that at some point in the distant past, she had been trapped, spayed, and released. Her belly was slightly swollen, mostly likely with peritoneal fluid, and she was terribly dehydrated.

I really admire the way the veterinarian took the time to examine her thoroughly. He looked the guy in the eye, and said, "She's very old and very sick. Very old, sick cats often have kidney disease or heart disease. We would need to run blood tests to figure out why she is sick, but we can't do those tests here [at Pro-Bone-O; it is basic triage and treatment, no diagnostics except what you can see with your own eyes]. If you can't afford the blood tests at the community vet clinic, I think the best option is to euthanize her today."

He didn't sugarcoat it or talk down to the guy. He calmly and quietly explained the situation. The guy sighed, and said, yeah, my buddy and I thought that might be the case. 

The veterinarian said, is that what you want us to do? And the guy said, yes. 

Pro-Bone-O operates on a shoestring with donated supplies and meds. They have no controlled substances except for one: the phenobarbital solution used for animal euthanasias. The veterinarian injected propofol under the cat's skin--she was so dehydrated that there was no way we were going to be able to use a vein. I waited with the guy and the old cat, both of us petting her together. After she was heavily sedated, the veterinarian injected phenobarbital into one of her kidneys. Her heart stopped less than a minute later.

The point of all this is not to tell you a gory story about euthanizing an old, sick cat. 

This is a rant about a man, very likely a man who fought in a war for this country, a man who now lives in a tent, who has nothing himself but manages to look after stray cats. A man who one day noticed that one of the cats was sick, and knowing that he could not help her or fix her problems, managed to get her to us. 

Where is the human decency in eliminating social programs that provide assistance to people like this veteran? This homeless man, whom many of our current elected leaders would consider a burden, has the charity and kindness in his heart to look out for the least amongst us. What a world it would be if we all tried to do the same.

Are You A Shruggie?

Shruggies is a term for health care providers, including doctors, nurses, and vets, who fail to challenge practitioners of SCAM (supplements and complementary and alternative "medicine"). Despite knowing there is no scientific basis, or even a chemical or physical basis, for many SCAM claims (e.g., homeopathy, acupuncture) and despite knowing that there is no clinical trial evidence for their efficacy (e.g., glucosamine), shruggies say, if the SCAM performs no better than placebo in well-designed clinical trials, then what's the harm? (More on placebo effects here.)


In the case of human doctors, the underlying deception involved in offering the patient a treatment that may make the patient feel subjectively better for a short period of time but fails to alter in any objectively measurable way their symptoms or condition is a matter of ethical debate. For example, is it ethical to not tell a patient they have a life-threatening illness so their final days will be happy and without stress? That's a deception that will certainly make them feel subjectively better for a short period of time, just like a SCAM. Most doctors would not accept the latter scenario as ethical. Then why would they accept as ethical the deception necessary for all SCAMs? And if they don't think that is ethical, then why are they willing to "shrug" it off?

In veterinary medicine, this deception that allows the owner feel better by "doing something" but leaves the animal to suffer cannot even be a matter of such debate: it is ethically wrong to that we permit this.

There is extensive peer-reviewed literature on the lack of efficacy of SCAMs. Pick any one of them that you like: detoxification, homeopathy, acupuncture, Chinese herbs, naturopathy, touch therapy, supplements. So many to choose from! Either they are described with feel-good woo words (natural, holistic, life force) or with laughably misused sciencey words (energy, quantum) or both. None of them stand up to objective, evidence-based clinical trials with a statistically significant number of participants and properly defined control groups. Some SCAMs are actively harmful, but most are simply no better than placebo. What's the harm? The SCAM of acupuncture is often offered as a pain treatment. It has been repeatedly shown in well designed clinical trials that acupuncture does not objectively and measurably reduce pain. It is ethically wrong for a SCAM practitioner to deceive a caregiver into believing their pet's pain is being reduced. It is just as ethically wrong for a shruggie to look at his colleague sticking needles into an animal and say, well, what's the harm? 

(Don't even get me started on the fact that human and veterinary acupuncturists are consistently photographed sticking needles into the skin of people and animals without wearing gloves. That is incredibly irresponsible and unprofessional.)

We humans do a very good job at finding quick justification for things that happen to us: I ate this berry then I got sick. Therefore that berry is bad. But is that the right conclusion? Does cause directly lead to effect? Perhaps the berry was not ripe--eat it two weeks later and it would not have made you sick. Perhaps you are allergic to that berry but someone else could eat it with no ill effect. Perhaps the berry had a mold or fungus on it that you could not see and that made you sick. Perhaps you ate something half an hour previously that in fact made you sick but you forgot about eating that other thing when you found the berry bush. Perhaps you were already sick with another illness and it was a coincidence that you began to show symptoms right after you ate the berry. We hate coincidences. We prefer the neat explanation, cause and effect tied up with a bow. We prefer explanations that mesh with our previously defined opinions.

Thinking through all the possibilities that could explain an event, that could sort out the cause and effect, is hard work and requires time and discipline. Setting aside our own logical fallacies and biases is even harder. Designing proper evidence-based tests with objective, quantitative measures of all the possibilities to determine which explanation was right is difficult and takes practice and time. (Correlation does not determine cause and effect, by the way. It only suggests two things are related.) Conducting the tests would take even more time. Isn't it simpler to jump to the easiest explanation: that berry is bad. 

What if you take that berry incident further? What if you now attach some sort of magical thinking to the berry or to your experience? For example, what if you concluded that a god didn't want you to eat that berry because the plant is sacred. Now not only is the berry bad for you, you've given it some additional properties. It's bad for you because it is magical.

Just imagine if your doctor or dentist or veterinarian treated your and your pet this way, using pre-scientific magical thinking instead of modern evidence-based medicine? Oops, that's exactly what SCAM practitioners do.
 


When it comes to SCAMs, ethical doctors and veterinarians should not shrug them off. We have the tools and the expertise to evaluate their claims of efficacy. Many studies have already been conducted and the evidence is clear. We need to speak up and educate our clients and our colleagues: belief in and use of SCAMs does cause harm (warning: this link goes to a PDF). 

I've left untouched in this screed discussion of caregiver bias (see additional discussion here), one of the underlying sources of placebo effect in veterinary SCAMs; the reliance on anecdote in SCAMs in place of evidence-based inquiry; and the straw man argument that Big Pharma is only in it for the money (if your SCAM practitioner is selling you a treatment that does nothing and that is based completely and fundamentally on your acceptance of a deception, who's really in it for the money?). 

I Miss Cheese

So before I launch into my rant, I just have to note that my blog readership appears to have increased by 50% in the past week. All the new readers appear to be in Russia? I can't be bothered to run a real analysis on user stats, so who knows what this means.

But back to the rant. I miss cheese. I really, really miss it.

I am on a diet. My goal, well, I have a goal but that's not the important point. My diet, the means by which I hope to achieve that goal, is simply calorie counting. That means I examine food labels, look up things at the USDA nutritional website, and measure out every single thing that I eat.

This is not a diet that requires the excessive consumption or avoidance of any particular food. I've got a set target for the total calories I want to consume each day and I negotiate with myself how that divides up (actually, I have a spreadsheet but it's the same thing). I start with the ideal of "everything in moderation" then balance that against my daily calorie cap. Even with that optimistic start, some foods simply have to go.

The first group of rejects included pasta and rice and bread. I am not going carb-free so sometimes I eat brown rice, and I quite like potatoes because they offer additional nutrients beyond starch depending on how they are prepared. But those other things, they were far too empty of significant nutrition.

Sadly, the next to go was olive oil and cheese.

The olive oil was easy. I now cook food instead with water, fruits, and a lot of spices. It's poaching instead of frying.

The real problem was cheese. For example, a rich, aged British cheddar can have atrociously high calorie counts, as many as 400 kilocalories per 28 grams. Using around 25% of your day's allotted calories on a piddling 28g of cheese is not workable. So cheese has gone. I can't even have it in the house because I eat it all up. This makes me sad.

A small consolation is yogurt. I don't eat any of those nasty fat-free products. None of that dry "Greek" junk either. I eat full-fat, natural yogurt so it has the satisfying mouth-feel of saturated fats without the horrible calorie inflation of cheese. When I need a snack, I choose yogurt first. Still, it's not the same.

I miss cheese.

Super Powers and Poisonous Frogs

I think I've mentioned before that the students taking animal science classes are overwhelmingly female. There is nothing inherently wrong with that but it's always nice to have a balance. So I was quite pleased to find out at the beginning of the term that the grad students taking the biostatistics course come from departments all over campus. The class is comprised of about 30% men--still skewed but reasonable. Students in public health, social sciences, and some of the other physical sciences are required to take the class so it has a pretty large enrollment every fall term, around 70 or so total.

We meet twice a week for lecture and once a week for a lab which is taught by a TA (teaching assistant, a grad student hopefully familiar with the course content). In lab, we learn how to use a specialized computer program to calculate various statistics. The lab content generally runs a lecture or two ahead of the lecture content. But for most labs, the TA gives us a quick crash course to introduce just enough of the new concepts so we can run the program and do that week's lab assignment.

Totally by chance, in my lab section, there is only one guy. He's memorable by that fact alone but there is something else that really sets this guy apart. He has a super power the likes of which I've never seen before.

He sucks the intelligence out of your very marrow if you sit within six feet of him. Sit right next to him and you are doomed. 

He's also a whiner. This serves as a convenient warning flag rather like the brilliant coloration of poisonous rainforest frogs. 

He complains vocally, loudly, petulantly, about everything he doesn't understand, which is everything. If you aren't paying attention to the warning flag and you happen to sit near him, or even worse, choose to do so, you get what you deserve: all your intelligence will disappear in a matter of minutes.

Today he compared reading the textbook to reading a "user's manual for an electric toothbrush in Cantonese". His exact words. I suspect that he believes himself to be clever and amusing but I find him embarrassing. I want to tell him to grow up, shut up, and listen. But I'm afraid to get too close. 

An Elaboration

So, let's say you are a creative and passionate person, maybe a poet or a musician, who is "inept at science". You have two young children. You read on the internet that vaccines cause autism. Since you are inept at science, you read this and you believe it. You don't investigate this claim any further because science is hard and you don't understand it. You believe this claim, however, because it meshes with your social views that large pharmaceutical companies are evil. You believe it because you think that taking drugs is putting poisons into your body, or at least, the drugs that you don't like because alcohol and caffeine are not drugs, right? You believe it because you saw something about this on TV but you can't really recall the details. You believe it because your sister-in-law, whom you really like, sent you the links. So you don't get your kids vaccinated. Measles is a disease that is entirely preventable when vaccines are administered. I could spin some tale about your child making another one sick, or you having to declare bankruptcy when your child has to be hospitalized for a preventable disease, but I won't do that. Instead, I'll just say this: it doesn't matter whether you are passionate and creative or not, in the flat, globalized world we live in today, unless you live naked under a freeway overpass and live on tubers and fungus that grow in your own shit, every single day you are responsible for making decisions that can affect others' lives. And even if you do live under that overpass, your shit is probably polluting some water source.

I would argue that making those decisions using critical thinking criteria is your duty as a citizen of the 21st century.

Let's consider another example. I'm sure that Texas Republican congressman Steve Stockman is really passionate about continuing to get re-elected. He may even be creative, possibly emulating Bush II by painting or practicing the difficult prose format of the short story in his spare time. Stockman also sits on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. On September 17, 2014, in reference to his difficulty in understanding how sea level will rise due to melting ice sheets, he stated that "if your ice cube melts in your glass, it doesn't overflow." I'll leave it to the reader to learn why that statement is problematic.

One might think that Stockman has an even greater duty as an elected representative to consider the problems he is confronted with in his elected role in the most rigorous and thorough manner, even if it means he has to deal with some hard math or science ideas in the process. But in truth, is his burden as a citizen in our modern world any more or less than yours or mine?

How about another example? Here in Oregon in November, we will be asked to vote on a proposition that could require all foods containing GMO to be labeled. There is plenty of shouting going on from both sides which obscures the real issues. The ballot, if passed, would require that foods, raw or processed, that contain components that were produced by genetic engineering be labeled as such. It exempts plant hybridization from its definition of genetic engineering, which is nothing more than special pleading. And for that reason, I will be voting against this ballot measure. 

Our lab techniques are not doing anything that people and microbes haven't been doing for many thousands of years in the case of the former and millions of years in the case of the latter. Yes, today we are doing it faster. But there is nothing new going on here. The ballot initiative is selectively anti-science and purposefully playing on emotions rather than encouraging critical thinking about the issue (because after all, the big agriconglomerates follow closely behind big pharma in the evil-doing department).

Oregon contains lots of creative and passionate people. Should we forbid those folks to vote on this ballot initiative in November if they are "inept at science"? Well, no, that isn't how democracy works. But I would certainly argue that everyone who chooses to cast a vote has a responsibility to try and understand the issues they are voting on. Maybe that means they need to learn about food labeling. Maybe they need to learn what a GMO is. It's a deceptively simple proposition with a complex set of related but obscure issues attached to it. 

It takes effort to sort out these issues, to find sources that provide background for them, and effort to not apply confirmation bias to everything we might read or hear about the issues. All that effort, well, that takes work. Are creative and passionate people not able to expend that effort? Are they too busying being creative? That's of course just as ridiculous as claiming that scientists are too busy being rational to be creative. Posing this as a dichotomy reinforces stereotypes. Emotion is easy, it's hard-wired into us. Critical thinking requires effort and a lot more time. But they are not either/or states of being. You don't suddenly wake up unable to write poetry or music after you learn how to think critically.

My post of yesterday had this point: we need to do a better job at teaching our young people relevant science and critical thinking skills, emphasis on relevant and critical. No, they don't need to become scientists. But they need to learn how to deal with the problems our world faces today. It doesn't matter what they grow up to be--poets or politicians or physicists.

Scientific Thinking

I was having coffee on campus with my friend Rachel this morning, and as it does every week, our conversation spiraled wildly out from our own research woes and successes (she's a biochemist) to the general state of the world.

One thing we share in common is an appreciation for science--we take pleasure in viewing the world through that lens. Perhaps it goes even deeper than that: we find it difficult to view the world any other way. But what glory there is to be found in knowing why, or if not knowing why, trying to find out (see: spiders can learn).

Today, we wandered into the topic of anti-vaxxers and anti-GMO-ers. She railed a bit on bubble-headed celebrities misleading the herd but I thought that there was more to it than that. It doesn't take much time on the internet to discern wide and relatively deep anti-science sentiments in the US and Europe. These views usually cross class, race, education, and even political boundaries. 

Vaccinations have been tested over and over using the most rigorous standards for clinical trials (randomized, double blind, etc.). They save lives. To argue any other position with respect to vaccinations is to engage in anti-scientific thinking. 

Same with GMOs. As Rachel aptly pointed out, there is no difference, none whatsoever, in the DNA of a tomato, an E. coli bacteria, or you, except in the particular sequence of the molecules in the DNA. The building-block molecules are all the same. We have been selecting horses, dogs, corn, thousands of organisms, for centuries, in some cases hundreds of thousands of years, to change those organisms to suit our fancies or our needs. Techniques to create a RoundUp-resistant wheat strain are based on the exact same theories that humans in the middle of the Eurasian continent used to select wild grasses that had heavier seed heads lo these many centuries ago. We've managed to speed the process up quite a bit, of course, and we use fancy machines and such. But the theory underlying the work is the same. And I would not for a moment defend some of the practices of the large agriconglomerates. But GMOs are not evil in and of themselves. 

No, the fundamental problem is that the average person does not understand science. She doesn't understand physics or chemistry. And she definitely has no solid grasp on genetics, the water cycle, or immunology. 

So we decided the solution was to stop teaching physics and inorganic chemistry. Oh, you want to learn about that? Then go to grad school. Instead, we think that kids in elementary school should be reproducing Mendel's pea experiments, that kids in middle school should be learning about global climate, that kids in high school should be learning about disease, epidemics, and epidemiological experimental design (Ebola, anyone?). You still think chemistry is important? Teach that through food science. Fermentation should cover most of what you need.

We need citizens who are prepared for the reality of our world. Who cares that a ball rolls faster down a steeper incline? Why in the world do you need to know about metal catalysts? Wouldn't it benefit our society now and in the future to have not just scientific specialists but all citizens thinking about how to address the problems we have now, not the problems science was dealing with 300 years ago?

We need citizens who can think rationally and critically. You read the headline "Breastfed kids perform better in school." You shouldn't view that as a refutation or acknowledgement of your particular social perspective. You should ask yourself, how were the participants in that study selected? Are they representative of a larger, general population? Were other factors taken into account? Could such a study be randomized and blinded, the gold standards for these kinds of experiments?

Too bad Rachel and I aren't in charge.

In Search of BBQ

I've always enjoyed good barbeque. Because I've traveled a lot, I've had a chance to sample all styles of the craft, including barbeque on offer in places like Texas, New Mexico, South Carolina, Brazil, and China. I've tasted quite a variety of beef, pork, sheep, goat, chicken, and sausages made from their respective parts. I've had barbeque with dry rub spices, with tomato-sugar sauce, and with yellow mustard sauce. I've eaten meats cooked over wood, over gas, on a spit, on a grill, in a hole in the ground. Part of the pleasure of good barbeque is learning about the craft that the chef brings to the process. Part of the pleasure also comes from good sides. In the US, these tend to be white bread or corn bread, vegetables (usually boiled), beans, fried things, and cole slaw. Most good US barbeque places make desserts, usually cobblers or sweet quick breads that can be cooked quickly in large quantities; pecan pie is a common barbeque house dessert in Texas. A good chef will pay attention to the details of all these things.

I am not a strict follower of just one school--there are many paths to getting good smoked meat. I prefer pork ribs to beef but I'll never turn down an offer of the latter. While I'm not a paid food critic or a chef in my own right, I do think that I know when barbeque is done right.

I've not eaten good barbeque in some years now. I was on the hunt for a local source, and everyone raves about this family-run place in the next town over. I decided to give it a try.

It was horrible. Utterly horrible.

The cornbread was so sweet that I almost thought I had been served flan made with a dusting of corn flour. I like flan a lot. But I was expecting corn bread. I could taste nothing but sugar. I took two bites and left it.

The salad dressing was gelatinous, neon pink. Supposedly it was a raspberry vinaigrette. It is not difficult to whip up a simple vinaigrette on demand or even by the gallon each day of service. And local berry sources abound. No excuse for this nasty, processed crap from a bottle.

The sweet potato tots were fried in old oil. Under the slightly rancid flavor of the oil, I could barely taste the potato. They had not been made from pieces of sweet potato but pureed sweet potato and they were undercooked so they were mushy instead of crispy.

The sausage was identical in texture and color to the cheap "summer sausage" one buys at the grocery store, with one difference. This sausage had twice the normal amount of salt in it. There was so much salt that it made my tongue swell. I like salt. I usually add it to most of my meals. But this was extreme. I left most of the sausage on the plate. Artisanal sausage hit mainstream grocery stores years ago. There wasn't any excuse for this either. If they didn't have time to make it themselves, they could have easily obtained good quality sausage from other local sources.

The ribs were smothered in so much sticky sauce that I could hardly tell meat from bone. And the sauce had no flavor of any kind except sugar. I presume it once had other ingredients waved in its direction but it seemed to be a glaze made from sugar and nothing else. It overwhelmed the meat. It was so thick that it left me with no option of adding other sauces.

On top of this pile of disappointments, the meal cost USD 20. The portions were generous but charging this much for poor quality food was insult added to injury. 

I scraped the glaze off the ribs and brought them home for the dogs. Mimi ate one and threw it up around midnight. My feelings exactly.

Godzilla

I hope you took a look at the Meat Atlas link--it's a fascinating read. If you did, then you learned that global production of poultry meat products was 106.4 million tonnes (that's metric tons or 1000 kg or 2204.6 lbs) in 2013, 34.5% of the global total of animal meat produced. Poultry products are projected to increase to about 126 million tonnes by 2020 and be valued around $1000 per tonne, or $126 billion dollars globally.

That's a lot of chicken nuggets.

At the risk of horrifying you further, I will leave this here:

My advisor is really bad about citing figure sources in class lectures, which really annoys me, so I don't know where this came from. But it depicts a typical broiler chicken in 1957, 1977, and today (which is probably 2002 or so; just guessing). Just as we have genetically selected dogs to have certain body shapes and colors and sizes to please our whims (compare the labrador retreiver and Chinese crested), we have genetically selected broiler chickens to have large, meaty breasts, the part of the bird with the largest market value. As a result, within only 50 years or so, we have created an eating machine: Godzilla, the modern broiler chicken. Three out of four molecules of food that go into the broiler's mouth are converted to muscle.

Back in the 1950s, it often took 10 or 12 weeks for a bird to reach "market weight." Modern broilers reach that now in 6 weeks. They are white because making pigmented feathers wastes energy that could be redirected to muscle tissue--all of the color was selected out of these genetic lines. The same two or three broiler breeds are used worldwide in a sort of poultry monoculture.

Don't think that free range or organic chickens are always better off. There are severe restrictions on the types of feed and supplements that they can receive and most of the free-range broilers destined for market develop severe nutritional deficiencies (most environments are very nutrient poor for foraging chickens, at even small production scales, and you can't supplement their feed with vitamins because those aren't organic) and parasites (can't give drugs either, so forget prophylactic dewormers). No broilers ever receive hormones--chickens don't have the metabolism to use them and it would basically have the opposite effect than that intended--it's a complete myth that chickens receive hormones. Cows, now that's a different story. Even in small production settings, female cows are given multiple hormone shots to force the herd to ovulate at the same time so that the AI servicing can be done on all of the herd in one go.

We selected for chicken Godzilla, generation after generation of broiler chicken, to feed our own insatiable need for nuggets and breast fillets (ironically, I detest both), just as our whimsy led to myriad breeds of dogs. 

The 2014 Meat Atlas

I encourage you to take a look at the Meat Atlas published by the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Friends of the Earth. The graphics are amazing but the data they depict are even more incredible.

The authors have an obvious bias to their underlying message, which is fine; they don't try to hide it or pretend their message is something it is not. But they are still able to present a rather clear-eyed review of global meat production and consumption data, a review that the industry itself does not seem able to prepare. They avoid hand-wringing and shrillness. 

It doesn't matter whether you never eat meat or eat it daily. In fact, it doesn't even matter what commodity we are talking about; we are citizens in a global economy, enjoying its many benefits such as cheap energy, food that is available year-round regardless of season, consumer goods that are true black boxes to the majority of users, while ignoring its many problems, such as misuse and pollution of land and water resources and food that is no longer produced locally, creating a chasm-scale disconnect between supplier and consumer. Don't get me started about black boxes.

Take a look at the Meat Atlas. I know that you will learn something new there.

Striving for Mediocrity

I recently learned that that several of the pre-vet students who applied to Oregon State University's vet school took their GRE exam last summer without any preparation at all. They were laughing and joking about how they didn't buy any workbooks and they didn't take any practice exams (there are two of these available for free on the GRE website). This isn't a new behavior for them, to be honest. Most of this group have taken required courses more than once because they failed the first time. I've been in several classes with them and noticed that they also seem to have problems coming to class on a regular basis.

The GRE is a four-hour-long, general knowledge exam. It is divided into several sections (math, reading, essay, etc.). It is required by nearly every vet school that I've spent any time investigating, even the ones outside the US such as Edinburgh and Guelph (in Ontario, Canada). Vet schools base their admitting decisions on a complicated set of criteria. Although I hear and read over and over again that a successful vet school applicant distinguishes herself from the pack through her letters of reference and personal statements, there is no doubt that schools use GPA and GRE score as a threshold discriminator, weeding out truly unsuitable candidates quickly so they can spend more time evaluating the more prospective ones. But I will admit that many schools seem to set that threshold relatively low.

Still, wouldn't you want your vet school application to reflect you doing your very best in all of the elements that are considered? Even if the bar is set low, wouldn't it help to distinguish your application if you demonstrated proficiency above and beyond that?

I've taken the GRE before. In fact, it was so many years ago that it was a written exam (it's entirely computerized now) and I was also required to take a second "subject matter" exam (in geology; it was only three hours long, not four). They don't use the subject matter exams anymore. I also took the LSAT around 10 years ago during a brief period when I was considering law school. I earned very high scores for both tests (and received invitations from relevant schools to join their programs). And that was not because I'm a genius but because I put in weeks of hard work preparing for them (the LSAT in particular had some fiendish "logic" problems).

There is a rather unpleasant girl in my French class who provides us with another example. I find her unpleasant in part because she only bathes and washes her hair once a week. Unless she is living in a cardboard box under a bridge (I know she is not), there is no excuse for being so slovenly. But mainly I find her unpleasant because I heard her tell her friend that since the homework only counts for 10% of our grade, she just needed to do half of it, and since attendance counts for another 10%, she didn't need to come to class every day. She also said that she can ignore one of the writing assignments because that will only be a few percent off too. She's not shooting for an A, although her comprehension of French is good enough that she could get that grade. No, she is aiming her sights on just passing with a minimum input of effort and time.

This striving for mediocrity is inexplicable to me. Even more of a mystery, all of the people involved seem somehow proud of their behavior, acting like they have gotten away with something or pulled the wool over the eyes of the system. They act like they have achieved something when it seems to me they have in fact lost a lot more in self respect and opportunities to learn.

Another Ridiculous Rant

This definitely falls in the category of "white man's burden" but I just spent, no, make that wasted, over two hours trying to get my laptop back into working order. 

See, I thought that I'd get smart and install some spiffy bibliography management software to help me manage the growing set of PDFs of published papers on poultry and animal nutrition that I am accumulating. I researched the options, then went to the Apple Store in the campus bookstore yesterday to see what kind of academic discount I could get on the gold standard of such software, EndNote. Unfortunately, I was blinded by the seemingly excellent price of an older version of EndNote--about USD 50, which was in the ballpark of some of the other packages out there. I bought it. I had to fiddle around with the installation since I have a Macbook Air which is solid state with no spinning parts of any kind (like a giant flash drive), which means it has no DVD drive. But I got EndNote installed at last. I spent an hour today getting it set up with a small set of references, enough to test formatting and other functionalies.

All seemed to be going well! My advisor Dr. Ch thought it was quite impressive that I would use software to manage PDF literature files.

Then this evening I decided to get a homework assignment out of the way. I fired up MS Word (I bought the student package of Office 2011 when I got my new laptop)...and Word wouldn't start. The dreaded spinning rainbow pizza, but no Word. 

After several increasingly angry hard shutdowns, I started doing some research on the problem. 

Turns out the seductively priced version of EndNote that I bought is not compatible with MS Office 2011 (the version of the iOS that I am running has also been implicated).

Bitch, you do not mess with my MS Office functions! I blasted that fucking EndNote software into 1 and 0 oblivion.

Word is now working fine. I purchased an upgrade for the EndNote software that is two levels up from my original version--for another USD 100! Suddenly that gold standard bibliography management package is looking gold-plated in cost too. To get it functioning again, I will have to re-install the old version then install the upgrade. But those are tasks for tomorrow as my frustration level is pretty high right now.

Now some of you clever computer types might be shaking your heads and saying, lilspotteddog, lilspotteddog, why are you using that evil MS Office? And I understand, I really do. Microsoft is evil. But I am using it because of compatibility and portability. The blessed trinity of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel are widely used in academia even though most of the operating systems are Apple. I would rather focus on content than fight formatting and version and extension problems with every file sharing event. On top of that, I am a power user of Excel and PowerPoint, which means I can really get a lot out of those programs quickly. And although this is a weak argument, I've been using MS Office for decades now. Wah, I don't want to learn how to use new software unless it does something that the holy trinity does not.

But I feel much better now that I've gotten this little rant off my chest. The rest of my Friday evening will go smoothly now. I'll take a break, go outside and throw tennis balls for the dogs (even Harry, although I roll the ball along the ground no more than 10 feet for him; no catching balls in the air for the old man). Then I'll get that homework assignment done. In Word. As I planned to do hours ago.

Illustration

After finding out 20 minutes before class was supposed to start that it was cancelled (prof is sick), an illustration of the difference between me and a 20-year-old:

20-year-old: I'm mad! I could have slept an hour longer.

Me: Great! I've got an exam today that I need to study for. I'm going to the library.

(I get up at the same time every weekday regardless of my class schedule. I study, clean the house, walk the dogs, whatever needs to be done.)