State Measures
There is a definite danger to animal health that is rearing its ugly head in legislatures and at the polls in a number of states. This is about a perceived shortage of veterinarians, and allowing non-veterinarians to perform work previously relegated by law only to veterinarians. According to the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) Journal (Dec. 2024) there is no dire shortage of veterinarians anticipated.
The nature of the legislation in Oregon, Senate Bill 976, is to allow lay persons to perform pregnancy checks on cattle, heretofore a strictly veterinary diagnostic procedure. Supposedly it requires 4 hours of training (which is insufficient) and there is no protocol for certification by the state that validates their qualification to do this procedure. This measure also states that this person shall report any disease conditions found. Lay people have little idea what to look for as they have no knowledge about the pathology and the appearance of the diseases that infect the bovine female reproductive organs like veterinarians have learned.
I once had a farmer that did his own pregnancy checks, which would be legal on his own cattle but not for a fee on his neighbor’s cows like this bill would permit. He said he had been taught to do this. He diagnosed that his cow was not pregnant and turned her out to high pasture for the summer. I received a call in the Fall that she was pregnant and he needed help. When I arrived I found a cow with a dead decaying calf inside. She was emaciated and very ill. I reached inside her shrunken vulva and pulled out the lower jawbone of the decayed calf. The smell was horrible. She was euthanized humanely.
This is the sort of thing that worries me about lay people with inadequate training performing veterinary procedures.
In Colorado this past election, November 2024, Proposition 129 came before voters. Its purpose was to create the legal position of a mid-level practitioner in veterinary medicine. It stimulated a strong negative response by organizations all across the country that opposed this measure, such as the AVMA, Colorado VMA, including more than 200 national and local veterinary, humane and breeder organizations, veterinarians, and veterinary technicians according the AVMA Journal (Nov. 2024). It was supported by the likes of the ASPCA, Dumb Friends League, Animal Welfare Assn of Colorado, and the Humane Society of the United States. The measure barely passed. Measures such as this should never go to the general public as they require complete understanding of what would be the ramifications created if it passes. Few voters go to the trouble to extensively research and completely understand certain measures. Not sending measure to voters becomes especially concerning when measures have public health implications, which is a discipline in which veterinarians spend many hours learning. Rather, voters in this case probably read the measure and thought “this sounds like a good idea” and then proceeded to vote in favor of it.
Now the Colorado State University College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences has come up with a program, which is to be a Master’s degree program in veterinary clinical care (MSB VCC) according to an article in the May 2025 Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association. This position is now referred to as a Veterinary Professional Associate or VPA. Applicants must have attained a bachelor’s degree that includes 20 credit hours in communication, math, biology, chemistry, physics, and anatomy and physiology. These prerequisites can be met on-line or in person. The MSB VCC program requires students to complete five semesters; the first three are on-line and consist of clinical anatomy and principles of surgery. The article points out that a typical medical curriculum would include hands-on laboratories, but in this case would not. In the fourth semester students would receive hands-on training in a laboratory classroom, and then it would be followed by a fifth semester of clinical training practicum with an approved community partner. It is primarily aimed to educate about dog and cat problems and procedures and not large animals.
The Colorado legislature has introduced a bill HB1285 to define the scope of their permissible tasks which are, (1) on a species for which they have received training, (2) it is within their education and training, (3) it is within the CVMBS (the vet school) determined scope of practice,(4) to do so under the immediate or direct supervision of a licensed veterinarian, and (5) the client has signed an informed consent form.
The Veterinary Medical Board of Colorado is tasked with testing these graduates for competency. These graduates are supposed to be able to do much of the same thing veterinarians: diagnosis, treatment, and even surgery according to Proposition 129. Graduates of this program are intended to fill a perceived deficiency in available veterinary care in animal shelters and rural and communities.
When I was the Program Director of a Veterinary Technology Program, which was 2 years (7 terms) in length, I designed a curriculum that had Laboratory Medicine, Radiography (not Radiology), Small Animal Diseases, Large Animal Diseases, and Public Health and Sanitation to name a few. There was little in-depth pathology taught, and no surgery as there was insufficient time to teach these in a 2-year program. The courses I taught were a good overview of these areas of medicine, but they certainly weren’t sufficiently in-depth to make students diagnosticians or have the ability to perform surgery.
I once substituted for a veterinarian that went on vacation leaving me with a fresh out-of-school veterinarian still in the internship months. The person had only done one spay on a live animal prior to graduating. Two times in the 2 months it was necessary for me to scrub into spay surgeries to help stop the hemorrhaging from a ligature that was improperly placed and not sufficiently constricting the blood flow so as to prevent bleeding. And this was a person trained in surgical technique.
House Bill, HB1285, also states that VPA’s are prohibited from performing surgeries “except for veterinary sterilizations or surgical procedures that do not enter a body.” This is poorly worded and I think the meaning is that these VPA’s cannot do surgical procedures that allow for entering a body cavity. This actually does permit a large number of surgeries that would be permitted as the bill is written. I am very wary that the VPA’s will have sufficient education to fulfill the role that is expected of them.
My fear was that this idea would spread to other states. Now Florida has introduced SB 652 and HB 729 to establish a VPA position.