Dear Caat,
It is not necessarily bad to be a guardian rather than an owner, except that it is a dilution of the legal relationship. I am not a lawyer, but as I understand it, the difficulty is when does the state (the government) get to step in?
Because the AVMA can pull a vet’s license (similar to the sanction process for pulling the license of an MD, a process I am somewhat familiar with) they are acting as the state in that case. The government, in effect, says only vets know enough about veterinary practice to regulate each other, so we’ll put the professional association in charge of when a vet gets to practice, or when they have screwed up so much that they don’t get to practice anymore. (I know this might seem like a tangent, but please bear with me.)
If we are only the guardians, and not the owners, of our animal companions, we do not have the same presumption of our right to make choices about their care. A guardian is not presumed to be as informed as the vet, for instance. So not only does the vet trump the guardian, but the professional vet association is trying to trump alternative modalities out of all practice (by both vets and non-vets) by defining it as not good veterinary practice, and not good for the animal.
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© Denise Schultz 2010
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