Lilly Atkins: The Trolley Problem in Veterinary Medicine
It’s a busy day in the veterinary clinic, with many people walking back and forth from exam rooms, to the x-ray room, to the kennel room, and back. I see one of the vet techs bringing back a cardboard box with a pet store logo on the sides. I follow her to the kennel room to help her set up a small enclosure for the hamster in the box.
“Did someone just get him and bring him in for a check-up? That's so thoughtful, a lot of rodent owners don’t do that.” I tell the tech as I try to hook up a water bottle to the side of the aquarium tank.
“No, he came from a pet store in Mount Pleasant, they said they think he has wet tail,” she says back to me.
Wet tail is a common, but serious gastrointestinal condition in hamsters that has to be treated quickly and delicately since they are such small animals. I can’t help but think about the conditions that pet store hamsters are often kept in and how that can result in diseases like this.
“Well, at least they noticed and brought him here before it was too late,” I say, trying to find some good in the situation.
Not even a full week later, I see one of the techs bringing back a yellow ball python with scales noticeably falling off along his whole body. A healthy snake will shed its skin in one long sheath, but these were flaking off in random places along the body. This is my first time seeing a snake at the clinic, so I follow the tech to one of the exam rooms to get some information.
“Why’s the snake here?” I ask her as she hands the snake off to me while she gathers some supplies.
“It came from a pet store in Mount Pleasant, the doctor is pretty sure it has scale rot,” she replies.
Immediately I think of the hamster that came in from that same pet store a week ago, and it makes me wonder about the pet store’s standards and how they’re treating their animals. But again, I am relieved they brought it here to seek treatment before things got too bad.
*
My internship in vet medicine challenged me in ways I had not necessarily thought it would. While I was prepared to face sad situations, I hadn’t thought about the fact that some of those “sad situations” would be having to return an animal to poor living conditions after trying to help it. I thought if the owner of an animal was worried enough about it to bring it to the vet for treatment, they must care about that animal and want the best for it. I hadn’t considered that the pet trade industry itself was going to be my moral challenger.
After some months have passed, I still find myself thinking about these animals, and the ones out there in similar situations. I often go back and forth questioning if helping these animals is just perpetuating a cycle for these pet stores. It is well known within the animal care community that pet stores do not give their animals the proper care, but it is brushed aside because the animals will only be there for a short time before they are purchased. But in cases where they aren't purchased quickly enough to get the proper care they need, they are shipped off to a vet for treatment, just to then be placed in the same conditions that caused the illness in the first place.
This cycle has been going on for a very long time, and I am not sure there is a good or safe way to end it. I view it as similar to the trolley problem often brought up in an ethics or psychology class: let the train keep going and hurt someone you know, or pull the lever to change the path of the train and hurt 10 people you don’t know. It’s a lose-lose situation. Administer care to the one animal they bring to the vet, and let the cycle continue to possibly take the lives of many other animals, or say no to the pet stores doing this and risk the lives of animals already there, but force them out of their unethical pet trade industry.
Because of my background in the pet care industry, I knew when I decided to go into veterinary medicine that I would likely face some moral dilemmas with clients. Maybe it would be people not telling the truth about how they care for their pet or how their pet got injured, or people just not being able to afford what needs to be done. Those are the sorts of things I’ve been mentally preparing myself for. Until this internship, I hadn’t thought about or prepared myself for the issues I might have with the various systems that feed into veterinary medicine.
It is an extremely nuanced topic, and I don’t expect myself to find any sort of solution for fixing the entire system, but fully contemplating on this topic and others like it makes me feel like I am preparing myself for what is to come. Some people might think I am jumping the gun by already considering issues I may run into once I am a practicing veterinarian, but this field is brutal to the people in it, and I want to do what I can to make sure I am well prepared to handle the emotional toll of it all.
Typically, when I say I am studying to be a veterinarian, I am met with one of two replies: “I’ve heard that’s harder than med school” or “You know they have one of the highest suicide rates of any career field.” Knowing these things, I think preparing myself for these ethical and moral issues I may face is extremely important for the future of my mental health, and being able to start that reflection now will only help me as I pursue my dreams.
I have no doubts that I am choosing the right career for myself, and none of this is to say otherwise; however, I now face a new set of circumstances that I need to process and think through so I can be prepared for them. School can teach me technical skills and information, but these types of issues and their solutions require internal reflection, and I am more than willing to put in that forethought for the betterment of my future self.
Lilly Atkins is a biology major who did her breakaway in the summer of 2023 at a small and exotic animal veterinary clinic in Charleston. She is expected to graduate in May of 2026, and she plans on attending veterinary school after her time at Lander.