Maintenance

As a veterinarian, I spent a lot of time giving advice and instructions to my clients, most of whom were completely ignorant about animals. According to a 1992 survey by an American veterinarian, only one per cent of the population knows anything about the psychological and physiological needs of their pets. It's pretty hard under those circumstances to take good care of them.

My most common maintenance activity was giving needless, often ineffective, and sometimes very dangerous vaccinations. Why aren't we vaccinated every year - as our pets are - with six or seven different vaccines at once? The answer is that they're usually not only unnecessary, but risky as well.

Pet owners often rely on veterinarians to recommend brands and types of pet food. But the food we give to our pets, including the stuff made by companies commonly recommended by veterinarians, is a slow-acting poison, contaminated with toxins and chemicals, and hardly adequate nutritionally. It's made from the garbage of our own food-production processes, including dead, dying, decaying and decomposing animals.

In some places, notably in Quebec but also in many states of the Union, even dead dogs and cats are picked up by rendering companies and mixed in with the rest of the unappetizing mess - along with their flea collars, identification tags and even the plastic bags used to carry their carcasses.