The University of Melbourne handed its teaching hospital to Greencross. I have questions. I want to be careful here. I want to be fair. I want to acknowledge that the University of Melbourne was in a genuinely difficult position — a reduced caseload, staff shortages, falling revenue, a hospital that had become financially unsustainable. These are real problems and they don't have easy solutions. But I also want to be honest about what I think happened, and what it means for t

Euthanasia is one of the most profound things we do in veterinary practice. Here's how to carry it — for new graduates, experienced vets, and the nurses who hold the room together. There is a moment, somewhere in your first year of practice, when you realise that euthanasia is not something you will do occasionally. It is something you will do regularly. Perhaps weekly. Perhaps more. Nobody fully prepares you for that. Vet school covers the technique. It covers the drugs and

In the interest of science, and after years of careful observation, we present this entirely affectionate taxonomy of the people who walk through our doors. Every veterinary professional develops, over time, a quiet internal classification system. You see a name on the consult list and you already know, roughly, what you're walking into. Not because you're judging — you're not — but because humans, bless them, are wonderfully predictable. Here, for the first time, is the offi

The moments that keep us going — and why nobody outside the profession quite understands them. There's a particular kind of joy that exists only inside a veterinary clinic. It doesn't make the news. It doesn't get many Instagram posts. It's not the dramatic stuff — the impossible surgery, the miraculous recovery, the tearful reunion. Those moments are real and they matter, but they're not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the small victories. The ones we celebrate in

A personal account of mental health in veterinary practice — and why we need to talk about it more honestly. I remember the exact moment I realised something was wrong. It wasn't a dramatic breakdown. There was no single case that broke me. It was a completely ordinary, and I was sitting in my car in the clinic car park for twenty minutes before I could make myself go inside. I wasn't sad exactly. I wasn't panicking. I just couldn't move. I sat there staring at the steering w

By Vet's Pawspective I remember my first solo consult. A limping Staffy, a worried owner, and me — standing in the consult room with a stethoscope around my neck and absolutely no idea whether I was about to diagnose a cruciate rupture or make a complete fool of myself. I got it right, as it happens. But that's not the point. The point is that nothing — not five years of lectures, not the clinical rotations, not the textbooks I'd highlighted within an inch of their lives — ha