China's vet shortage
February 24, 2024 8:37 PM Subscribe
China has less than one-third the number of vets per capita as the United States or European Union. My cat had a health emergency this week and I had to call about 30 different animal hospital/clinics to see which one had a surgeon and a free OT to operate on my cat that afternoon. Thankfully, one out of the 30ish were able to take us at short notice.
Pet owners in China probably do not have that luxury — despite producing more than 10,000 veterinary science undergraduates, China has less than one-third the number of vets per capita as the United States or European Union. In 2023 alone households are raising 51.75 million dogs and 69.8 million cats.
Biggest contributor seems to be the low salaries.
From article: "One of the biggest hurdles for early career vets is the low pay. Despite the lengthy training process, the average entry-level vet in Shanghai earns just 5,000 yuan ($700) a month, according to a report by Ping An Securities, while the average newly minted university graduate in the city earns 6,700 yuan.
At this point in her career, Ma earns almost 10,000 yuan a month, which she says is more than enough in a city like Xi’an. But reaching that point can be tough, especially for recent graduates who haven’t passed their licensing exam. “If you can’t get a vet license, you can only work as an intern, which means a salary of 2,000 to 3,000 yuan a month,” she says. Licensed vets make more, but their pay still lags behind other industries for the first several years of their career.
That’s what happened to Yang. After graduation, she got a job as an intern in a large pet hospital where she made 2,000 yuan a month. She described the work as grueling, with 12-hour shifts that left her no time to eat. Between the pay and the workload, she felt she had no future in the industry."
Similar stories in Australia, Ireland, and Scotland, among others.
Pet owners in China probably do not have that luxury — despite producing more than 10,000 veterinary science undergraduates, China has less than one-third the number of vets per capita as the United States or European Union. In 2023 alone households are raising 51.75 million dogs and 69.8 million cats.
Biggest contributor seems to be the low salaries.
From article: "One of the biggest hurdles for early career vets is the low pay. Despite the lengthy training process, the average entry-level vet in Shanghai earns just 5,000 yuan ($700) a month, according to a report by Ping An Securities, while the average newly minted university graduate in the city earns 6,700 yuan.
At this point in her career, Ma earns almost 10,000 yuan a month, which she says is more than enough in a city like Xi’an. But reaching that point can be tough, especially for recent graduates who haven’t passed their licensing exam. “If you can’t get a vet license, you can only work as an intern, which means a salary of 2,000 to 3,000 yuan a month,” she says. Licensed vets make more, but their pay still lags behind other industries for the first several years of their career.
That’s what happened to Yang. After graduation, she got a job as an intern in a large pet hospital where she made 2,000 yuan a month. She described the work as grueling, with 12-hour shifts that left her no time to eat. Between the pay and the workload, she felt she had no future in the industry."
Similar stories in Australia, Ireland, and Scotland, among others.
The typical veterinarian career track looks something like this: four to five years as a student followed by an internship, then a period as a veterinary assistant – first junior, then intermediate, then senior — followed by promotion to resident, then outpatient doctor, attending doctor, and finally director or associate director of a hospital.
Is that really true? When the courses are so heavily geared towards agriculture, the typical vet never touches that world? Where I'm from, the typical vet career is: school, university, then being at an abattoir signing off on slaughtering happening humanely. That's where the list ends. There are far more vets employed in food production than there are looking after sick cows and horses, or dogs and cats. Given the acknowledgement that that is where the training is focused on China as well, I would imagine that's a substantial proportion of working qualified vets too, just ignored on the article in favour of a laser-focus on pets?
posted by Dysk at 1:07 AM on February 25 [3 favorites]
Is that really true? When the courses are so heavily geared towards agriculture, the typical vet never touches that world? Where I'm from, the typical vet career is: school, university, then being at an abattoir signing off on slaughtering happening humanely. That's where the list ends. There are far more vets employed in food production than there are looking after sick cows and horses, or dogs and cats. Given the acknowledgement that that is where the training is focused on China as well, I would imagine that's a substantial proportion of working qualified vets too, just ignored on the article in favour of a laser-focus on pets?
posted by Dysk at 1:07 AM on February 25 [3 favorites]
Given the acknowledgement that that is where the training is focused on China as well, I would imagine that's a substantial proportion of working qualified vets too
Perhaps some of this is due to regional preferences -- China loves pork, the US goes for beef. But cattle sell for 10x what a pig does, and have a much longer maturity period. I'm also going to hazard a guess that, given they cost less to buy and sell, and turn over faster, there's a lot of small pig farmers in China who can't afford staff vets.
But probably the state has a small army of vets fighting various swine flu challenges. I hear a pretty regular drumbeat in the news of mandatory herd destruction in China.
posted by pwnguin at 2:12 AM on February 25
Perhaps some of this is due to regional preferences -- China loves pork, the US goes for beef. But cattle sell for 10x what a pig does, and have a much longer maturity period. I'm also going to hazard a guess that, given they cost less to buy and sell, and turn over faster, there's a lot of small pig farmers in China who can't afford staff vets.
But probably the state has a small army of vets fighting various swine flu challenges. I hear a pretty regular drumbeat in the news of mandatory herd destruction in China.
posted by pwnguin at 2:12 AM on February 25
(Where I'm from, which is not the US, the vets in the abattoirs are very much dealing with pigs as well. There are indeed likely to be small scale operators without e.g. staff vets, but any export operation is going to need to produce that paperwork.)
posted by Dysk at 2:53 AM on February 25
posted by Dysk at 2:53 AM on February 25
Low salaries means oversupply of or low demand for pet vets, not undersupply or high demand. The Chinese labor market is not fully free, but it’s definitely free enough for that to be true. I’d guess the driver is more likely a low ability to pay fees by pet owners.
US customer prices for vet care and salaries for vets reflect the market far better than any other health discipline because there’s far less distortion from insurance and government mandates and subsidies. In line with this, there’s a remarkable surge in planned new vet med schools … demand creating its supply, as it were.
posted by MattD at 4:30 AM on February 25
US customer prices for vet care and salaries for vets reflect the market far better than any other health discipline because there’s far less distortion from insurance and government mandates and subsidies. In line with this, there’s a remarkable surge in planned new vet med schools … demand creating its supply, as it were.
posted by MattD at 4:30 AM on February 25
I don't know where you live in the USA but our vet bills for our dog were very high. Luckily we had insurance. Unfortunately we lost him to cancer last December.
posted by DJZouke at 5:06 AM on February 25 [2 favorites]
posted by DJZouke at 5:06 AM on February 25 [2 favorites]
Somewhere now close to 25 years ago, we agreed to cat sit a pair of cats for student who was attending the local Canadian university, while she went home just for the summer.
She had always wanted a cat, but no one she knew had any pets and it was out of the question that she get one in China, while living at home. So the very first thing she did after settling into her student residence was to find an apartment instead, which she moved into and shared with her boyfriend and a room mate, and then she hurry out and get a kitten - two kittens, a black longhair and a black short hair, siblings whom she name Shadow and Prince.
There was a learning curve - the room mate complained to use that when he took the cats into the shower to wash them, they ripped hell out of his chest. Both cats had a very few sparse white hairs, which they plucked.
At the end of May the cats were brought sorrowfully to us, along with a big bag of dry cat food, sufficient to feed them over the entire summer and a couple of days later, she and her boyfriend and the room mate all returned to China.
Things did not go according the plan. The couple's mothers had become highly suspicious - so suspicious that they came to Beijing and were waiting at the airport to confront them. Everything was confirmed on sight - they had traveled together and were caught having been spending the hard earned money they families were sending them on a more expensive apartment to live in sin, on pets and unapproved fashion choice. I am told that the mothers ripped their piercings out right there at the airport. Neither member of the couple was allowed to return to Canada. The account of the scene of outrage and guilt was given to us by the room mate when he came back in August.
So we ended up with two cats, who lived very long lives and cost me more than I am comfortable admitting to, for their veterinarian care. Prince broke a leg towards the end of his life and had to go on cage rest so he wouldn't try to move around on it. Instead my daughter made a nest for him on her own mattress on the floor and slept there with him. It was an area as small as a cage and included his cat box and food and water dishes, raised to the same height as the mattress. There was just enough room for her, him, the cat box and the dishes. He mended very well and had another year of active cat life.
But the anecdata I am sharing in this account is that there was recently a cohort of the Chinese middle class who disapproved of having pets, as an at least slightly immoral luxury, as well as believing that having animals in the home was dirty. I would not be in the least surprised if our student got another cat, once she was old enough and had the financial wherewithal to be independent of her parents, but it sounds like she was on the cutting edge of her generation in taking on pet ownership.
I myself remember when the decent money in veterinarian care here was entirely the large animal practice. (Late sixties, early seventies.) The attitude to animal welfare when I was a little kid was different. Most cat and dog owners kept their female inside when it was in heat. They weren't fixed because that kind of complex surgery for a cat was considered excessive, and anyway likely the cat would die while they were doing it. Only the males were fixed because that was external surgery. There was really no heroic care. The only vaccine was for rabies, and millions of unwanted kittens and puppies destined to not find homes with people were born every year in any large city. The basic assumption for the vast majority of pet owners was that if your cat or dog needed medical care, the humane thing to do was to put it down.
The only reason there was money in large animal veterinarian care was because of all the mandatory testing and vaccinations farmers were required to give to their livestock, and because people would go to heroic lengths for their horses. It was worth investing a little money to keep an entire herd of thirty or forty dairy cows from going to the knacker, but if one cow had an issue that required medical care, it was likely to be more economical to send her straight to auction. She would almost certainly go immediately to the abattoir from there, although back-to-the-landers would keep their eyes out for a milker with mastitis scarring in only one or two teats - she would still produce more than enough milk for a single homesteading couple of hippies. Farmers did not opt to pay for veterinarian services beyond what they were required to, but there were plenty of mandatory inspections to keep a rural veterinarian decently paid and busy doing a round of farms.
I think we have forgotten how recently people in this part of the world regarded veterinarian care as optional. By the eighties you were getting shamed if you didn't give your pet veterinarian care at all, but often the shame was because you should have had the poor thing put down, not because you were expected to put money into keeping it alive or restoring it to better function. It really didn't make much sense to put $400 into treating a cat's broken leg then, with surgery and antibiotics and convalescence, if there was a high chance that it would pick up rhino as soon as it went back outside to its usual haunts - rhino in cats was considered lethal enough that a diagnosis ordinarily led to a recommendation to put the cat down so it wouldn't infect the rest of the cat population, rather than a vet bill for nursing care.
Available vet care is relatively new in the West. It's not surprising that it isn't as available in China, and given that their economic boom appears to have peaked, I would surprised if they ever do get as deeply and passionately into animal welfare as we have.
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:21 AM on February 25 [7 favorites]
She had always wanted a cat, but no one she knew had any pets and it was out of the question that she get one in China, while living at home. So the very first thing she did after settling into her student residence was to find an apartment instead, which she moved into and shared with her boyfriend and a room mate, and then she hurry out and get a kitten - two kittens, a black longhair and a black short hair, siblings whom she name Shadow and Prince.
There was a learning curve - the room mate complained to use that when he took the cats into the shower to wash them, they ripped hell out of his chest. Both cats had a very few sparse white hairs, which they plucked.
At the end of May the cats were brought sorrowfully to us, along with a big bag of dry cat food, sufficient to feed them over the entire summer and a couple of days later, she and her boyfriend and the room mate all returned to China.
Things did not go according the plan. The couple's mothers had become highly suspicious - so suspicious that they came to Beijing and were waiting at the airport to confront them. Everything was confirmed on sight - they had traveled together and were caught having been spending the hard earned money they families were sending them on a more expensive apartment to live in sin, on pets and unapproved fashion choice. I am told that the mothers ripped their piercings out right there at the airport. Neither member of the couple was allowed to return to Canada. The account of the scene of outrage and guilt was given to us by the room mate when he came back in August.
So we ended up with two cats, who lived very long lives and cost me more than I am comfortable admitting to, for their veterinarian care. Prince broke a leg towards the end of his life and had to go on cage rest so he wouldn't try to move around on it. Instead my daughter made a nest for him on her own mattress on the floor and slept there with him. It was an area as small as a cage and included his cat box and food and water dishes, raised to the same height as the mattress. There was just enough room for her, him, the cat box and the dishes. He mended very well and had another year of active cat life.
But the anecdata I am sharing in this account is that there was recently a cohort of the Chinese middle class who disapproved of having pets, as an at least slightly immoral luxury, as well as believing that having animals in the home was dirty. I would not be in the least surprised if our student got another cat, once she was old enough and had the financial wherewithal to be independent of her parents, but it sounds like she was on the cutting edge of her generation in taking on pet ownership.
I myself remember when the decent money in veterinarian care here was entirely the large animal practice. (Late sixties, early seventies.) The attitude to animal welfare when I was a little kid was different. Most cat and dog owners kept their female inside when it was in heat. They weren't fixed because that kind of complex surgery for a cat was considered excessive, and anyway likely the cat would die while they were doing it. Only the males were fixed because that was external surgery. There was really no heroic care. The only vaccine was for rabies, and millions of unwanted kittens and puppies destined to not find homes with people were born every year in any large city. The basic assumption for the vast majority of pet owners was that if your cat or dog needed medical care, the humane thing to do was to put it down.
The only reason there was money in large animal veterinarian care was because of all the mandatory testing and vaccinations farmers were required to give to their livestock, and because people would go to heroic lengths for their horses. It was worth investing a little money to keep an entire herd of thirty or forty dairy cows from going to the knacker, but if one cow had an issue that required medical care, it was likely to be more economical to send her straight to auction. She would almost certainly go immediately to the abattoir from there, although back-to-the-landers would keep their eyes out for a milker with mastitis scarring in only one or two teats - she would still produce more than enough milk for a single homesteading couple of hippies. Farmers did not opt to pay for veterinarian services beyond what they were required to, but there were plenty of mandatory inspections to keep a rural veterinarian decently paid and busy doing a round of farms.
I think we have forgotten how recently people in this part of the world regarded veterinarian care as optional. By the eighties you were getting shamed if you didn't give your pet veterinarian care at all, but often the shame was because you should have had the poor thing put down, not because you were expected to put money into keeping it alive or restoring it to better function. It really didn't make much sense to put $400 into treating a cat's broken leg then, with surgery and antibiotics and convalescence, if there was a high chance that it would pick up rhino as soon as it went back outside to its usual haunts - rhino in cats was considered lethal enough that a diagnosis ordinarily led to a recommendation to put the cat down so it wouldn't infect the rest of the cat population, rather than a vet bill for nursing care.
Available vet care is relatively new in the West. It's not surprising that it isn't as available in China, and given that their economic boom appears to have peaked, I would surprised if they ever do get as deeply and passionately into animal welfare as we have.
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:21 AM on February 25 [7 favorites]
any export operation is going to need to produce that paperwork.
In doing background research for my comment above, I frequently encountered a statistic: China has 18 percent of the world population but only 7 percent of the arable land. This does not strike me as a situation where a food export driven economy would be present and the OEC data indicates it is not.
Some of this is driven by the swine flu herd culling but typically one doesn't implement a national strategic reserve for a commodity so plentiful you can widely export it. Though apparently Canada has one for Maple syrup, acting as a cartel to keep the price high.
Anyways, now that I'm not insomnia posting, and actually read the OP article, it actually addresses the pet/agriculture divide:
In doing background research for my comment above, I frequently encountered a statistic: China has 18 percent of the world population but only 7 percent of the arable land. This does not strike me as a situation where a food export driven economy would be present and the OEC data indicates it is not.
Some of this is driven by the swine flu herd culling but typically one doesn't implement a national strategic reserve for a commodity so plentiful you can widely export it. Though apparently Canada has one for Maple syrup, acting as a cartel to keep the price high.
Anyways, now that I'm not insomnia posting, and actually read the OP article, it actually addresses the pet/agriculture divide:
Many prospective veterinary science students imagine they will spend their careers tending to this booming market, but most university programs remain geared toward agriculture rather than pet care.posted by pwnguin at 10:08 AM on February 25
[...]
This is especially true for those who perform their required internships on large farms, like Chen Jiaxi, a fifth-year student at South China Agricultural University — one of the few schools in China that offers a major in small animal medicine. Chen plans to switch to a resource track after graduation, rather than work on a farm. “(Working at) an animal hospital would be acceptable,” she says. “But a farm? I can’t bear to think about it.”
Is 'per capita' referring to the humans or the pets, in this case? The article does indicate that China has less pet owners, so this could very well be an appropriate ratio?
posted by demi-octopus at 10:38 AM on February 25
posted by demi-octopus at 10:38 AM on February 25
We adopted two cats when we lived in China. The first one died within a couple of days and the vet we were working with seemed to be very unskilled. He was playing some video game like World of Warcraft when we were talking to him about what medicine he'd given our cat. The second we brought back to the US and lived almost ten years out of China, but we had a very bad experience with the spaying process in China. They left a large somewhat open wound that we had to treat with a blue disinfectant and then when it didn't fully heal, the vet gave her a spinal shot of something and the trauma of that experience permanently changed her to be a non-cuddly cat. But she still had a pretty good life after that. I never heard her purr in China, but when we got to the US, she started purring regularly.
Getting her out of China took a couple of tries, and finally we figured out that (at least in 2010) there was a single vet clinic in all of Beijing that could do the required paperwork to take a cat out of China and it required multiple visits over the course of the week prior to the international travel. We didn't live in Beijing, but we figured out a way to get it done by modifying our travel to fly out of Beijing. We couldn't figure it out in Shanghai, or Nanjing, where we lived. It was much harder to get the cat out of China than into the US (which really only seemed to care about having a rabies vaccine). Ironically, the only way we found out about the clinic in Beijing was a lucky coincidence on our first failed attempt to get the cat out of the country. We thought we'd done everything we needed in Nanjing and I took the cat to the airport. Got the ticket gate and they said I was missing some paperwork and the cat couldn't travel. I had to go so I left the cat at the airport and called friends to find someone to pick the cat up. When I got to my seat in the airplane, there was an English-language newspaper on the seat next to me and the big feature in the center of the issue was a detailed write-up of the steps needed to export a pet including the timeline of what needed to be done and the address of the clinic in Beijing where it could all be done. We'd been searching online and asking around for this info and couldn't find it anywhere, and then it magically shows up next to me on the day that I tried and failed to get our cat out of the country.
--
Separately, outside of Nanjing, there was a somewhat well-known-in-China woman named Ha Wenjin, who operated a farm where she housed hundreds of rescued cats and dogs. Volunteers would go out to the farm weekly or so and bring food, medicine, blankets, etc., for the animals. At the time, it was rumored that Nanjing was one of the main places where unscrupulous exotic animal butchers from the south would steal cats and dogs (both from the streets and from people's homes) for sale as meat. Ha Wenjin and her volunteers worked to save homeless animals from this fate and would scoop them up to live out their days on the farm. They were operating on a shoestring budget, but provided warm shelter, food (mostly hotdogs and baozi, when I saw a feeding; seemed like whatever they could get donated), and basic medical care like vaccinations and ear/teeth cleanings when needed. You can see some of my photos from a weekend volunteer visit in probably 2008 or 2009. It's not in the gallery there, but I remember one of the volunteers had a hoodie that said, "I'm Chinese but I don't eat cats and dogs."
posted by msbrauer at 11:59 AM on February 25 [5 favorites]
Getting her out of China took a couple of tries, and finally we figured out that (at least in 2010) there was a single vet clinic in all of Beijing that could do the required paperwork to take a cat out of China and it required multiple visits over the course of the week prior to the international travel. We didn't live in Beijing, but we figured out a way to get it done by modifying our travel to fly out of Beijing. We couldn't figure it out in Shanghai, or Nanjing, where we lived. It was much harder to get the cat out of China than into the US (which really only seemed to care about having a rabies vaccine). Ironically, the only way we found out about the clinic in Beijing was a lucky coincidence on our first failed attempt to get the cat out of the country. We thought we'd done everything we needed in Nanjing and I took the cat to the airport. Got the ticket gate and they said I was missing some paperwork and the cat couldn't travel. I had to go so I left the cat at the airport and called friends to find someone to pick the cat up. When I got to my seat in the airplane, there was an English-language newspaper on the seat next to me and the big feature in the center of the issue was a detailed write-up of the steps needed to export a pet including the timeline of what needed to be done and the address of the clinic in Beijing where it could all be done. We'd been searching online and asking around for this info and couldn't find it anywhere, and then it magically shows up next to me on the day that I tried and failed to get our cat out of the country.
--
Separately, outside of Nanjing, there was a somewhat well-known-in-China woman named Ha Wenjin, who operated a farm where she housed hundreds of rescued cats and dogs. Volunteers would go out to the farm weekly or so and bring food, medicine, blankets, etc., for the animals. At the time, it was rumored that Nanjing was one of the main places where unscrupulous exotic animal butchers from the south would steal cats and dogs (both from the streets and from people's homes) for sale as meat. Ha Wenjin and her volunteers worked to save homeless animals from this fate and would scoop them up to live out their days on the farm. They were operating on a shoestring budget, but provided warm shelter, food (mostly hotdogs and baozi, when I saw a feeding; seemed like whatever they could get donated), and basic medical care like vaccinations and ear/teeth cleanings when needed. You can see some of my photos from a weekend volunteer visit in probably 2008 or 2009. It's not in the gallery there, but I remember one of the volunteers had a hoodie that said, "I'm Chinese but I don't eat cats and dogs."
posted by msbrauer at 11:59 AM on February 25 [5 favorites]
I have a frustrating enough experience with vet care here in the US. ("Hi yes, my dog has a blocked anal gland and I need someone to express it safely" "Our next available appointment is in an week" - this just happened with me. Gland ended up rupturing and needed an emergency appointment to deal with it. grr.. and not the vets fault -they're overworked and there's not enough of them and Mars Petcare is trying to squeeze every drop they can because it's more lucrative than candy)
I couldn't imagine dealing with the situation there in China. I'd literally lose my shit.
posted by drewbage1847 at 10:29 AM on February 26
I couldn't imagine dealing with the situation there in China. I'd literally lose my shit.
posted by drewbage1847 at 10:29 AM on February 26
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The quality of care has plummeted and the costs have become eye-popping. My last vet bill for a dog with a bout of digestive distress and that required a two-night stay topped $16,000.
posted by bz at 9:40 PM on February 24 [10 favorites]