Episode 20: A Vet's Eye View

An interview with Rhona Warnock, veterinary surgeon specialising in rehabilitation and sports medicine who is also an accomplished mountaineer and martial arts instructor.

We discuss her take on designing better lives for animals, but also those that look after them

Transcript

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A brief introduction to today's podcast for technical reasons that, uh, I don't understand. I have found it necessary to revoice Rhona Warnock, whose interview this is, Rhona has a Scottish accent, which of course is now completely lost. However, the content is there and I hope you enjoy. Hello and welcome to another edition of Make Life Better by Design. I'm your host Kevin Drayton for many, many years, a chartered architect in private practice. But I've also taught and written about design and will bore anybody legless, who's willing to listen to me at parties and so on. Today I'm very pleased to say that I'm joined by Rhona Warnock. Now, Rhona principally, I suppose, is a vet. She's a partner in a large veterinary practice based in Yorkshire that, well, let's say the name Donaldson's Vet's Limited. And uh, they're quite a substantial practice with several surgeries around our area. But they also have a big presence on TV with the practice appearing in programs like the Yorkshire Vet and others. So welcome Rhona. Uh, I've given you a little bit of a buildup, but I should add because it's only fair that although Rhona is principally Avett, she's also a highly accomplished martial arts expert. And I'm hoping in the course of this interview we may find out a little bit more about some of her other interests. So at last I'll shut up and over to you. Rhona, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself then? Hello Kevin. Um, thank you for your kind introduction. I'm a veterinary surgeon. I've been qualified for more years than I care to remember now, and I've lived in Yorkshire for most of my life and I've been with my practice since I was 14 years old. My special interest is in rehabilitation and sports medicine, so I'm the director of our rehabilitation center. Great. Um. One of the difficulties with this podcast, apart from the fact it's me making it, is that it is ostensibly talking about design and making life better, but my definition of design is very wide indeed, and can be applied to almost anything. So I have no problem at all inviting you to talk about it from the perspective of a veterinary surgeon. And we'll find out whether or not I'm just barking up the wrong tree. Uh, that's a good one. Barking up the wrong tree. I'll try and think of other animal puns if I can as we go along. Okay. So Rhona, do you ever think of what you do in terms of making life better? I think so my immediate response is that most of what I do is aimed at making my patients' lives better, but the bond between humans and animals is incredibly strong, and I like to hope that in making my patients' lives better, that that helps to make life better for their caregivers owners as well. Because I think when we have pets, we want them to be happy and enjoy their life. It makes us happy and fulfilled if they are indeed. Now, the other bit of the title by design can be a bit difficult. When I say by design, all I mean is, is that people should act in a positive way, making choices, taking decisions that are well informed. And particularly in an area with pets and with veterinary surgery, I imagine many pet owners or even animal owners, because of course it's not just pets we're talking about, don't really have that much knowledge or understanding of the sort of things that can help their animals. Is that fair or not? Am I being unfair to them? I think maybe a little bit unfair because my experience certainly over the last decade or so. Is that a lot of animal owners and caregivers are very well informed and actually have gone to great lengths to find out what they might be able to do for their animals, and that's part of our job to help guide and signpost them. But I do think that most people have already done quite a lot of investigation by the time they come to see us. And has much of that investigation been done on the good old interweb? Yes, yes. But also by speaking to friends, colleagues, neighbors. I think there's an awful lot of sources of information available these days. I regularly hear people have found information in sources that I wouldn't particularly have thought of. Right. Now, one or two other people I've spoken to on the subject of the internet, they say, oh, for goodness sake, I wish people wouldn't go and pick up bits of information. There can do more harm than good. But on the whole, you think that access to information through the internet, certainly in terms of what we're discussing now, you, you think it's a good thing? You think that explosion of information being available is good? Yes. There are circumstances when people have come across information that's misleading or incorrect, but at the very least, it opens the debate and you can have a conversation and explain why you don't agree with that. That can, I think, be helpful. Alright, that's good. Now again, slightly trickier one, um, I've said that other people misunderstand sometimes what I mean by design, but what does design mean to you in, well, just in your day to day life? I think design means something was intentional or planned. Hopefully done with thought behind it. Oh yeah. Well that aligns pretty much with my view. Thankfully, you've not said Well, it means you know, something looking nice, which is as far as people seem to go very often. Well, I think that my job involves looking at cats and dogs who are very beautiful and look nice. But not necessarily the most beautiful looking parts of them. Indeed, indeed, there's a certain type of personality that can do your job. Uh, mine is not amongst them, I'm afraid. Now you, you're obviously very well regarded in your profession and have been for a long time, but as I touched on at the beginning, you're certainly not a one dimensional character, and there's a lot more to you than that. Can you tell us a little bit more about those other aspects and indeed how they may touch on this matter of making life better by design? Well, I was always given the advice, like a lot of people never to work with children or animals, but I seemed to have fallen into that trap in both directions. I've always had a lot of sporting interests and these days I spend most of my spare time either coming up or down mountains in various different ways or involved in martial arts as primarily, uh, a coach and mainly with the younger children in our club. We have a not-for-profit club run by a group of volunteers, and we try to make martial arts accessible to everybody and we've tried to create a safe space there. A lot of the things we do don't even really involve martial arts anymore. We like to take people out and meet people, go places they wouldn't otherwise do, and just broaden their general experience. So inside the Doja, I spent a lot of my time being squarely beaten by small children these days. Sounds good. Some people pay for that, but there we are. Um, so do you see what you are doing there then as designing activities, systems, whatever, to make their lives better? So your physical activity happens to be a combination of mountaineering and um, martial arts by the sound of it. Uh, in my case, I advocate getting all children involved in rugby as early as they can.'cause it's certainly done a lot for me over the decades. Yeah. Um, I can't honestly think of any sort of physical activity that isn't beneficial really. But do you feel that a lot of kids are missing out on that at the moment, or do you think they're not doing too badly? I think a lot of kids are missing out on a huge number of opportunities and experiences. I've had to explain to a young child that they were sweating, apparently an experience they'd never had before, and they were scared. The 25 years or so that I've been involved in martial arts, the relative level of flexibility and suppleness, well, like a lot of the young kids that come to us is quite scary. We as 50 something year old coaches are more bendy than some of the young kids. Something's going on. I think that may well signal to what will be my closing question to you today, but, but that's how you see things have happened or are happening for children nowadays. What about the way in which people respond to animals? A classic example. Um, you see, you see television programs where people are dressing poodles up in all sorts of outfits and putting jewels on them. Do you think that the moment we've got a good or a bad relationship with animals? Um, I think it would be a generalization to put everything under the one umbrella. I think the trend might not necessarily be in the right direction in all the ways, but it comes from a position, an underlying position of caring about animals. I think there are reasons why a dog might wear a jacket or a coat to keep them warm, to keep the blood flow into their muscles, and not entirely sure though that they need to be wearing Halloween costumes. At least people are spending time with their animals and they're interacting with them. Yeah. And social interaction is one of the things that most species need. Yes, I, I know that as a practice you deal with animals of all types and sizes. Do you find a distinction between, uh, what I will loosely call pets and well perhaps farm animals, wild animals? Do people sort of tend to put them into groups or silos? Do you see any difference in the way that they treat one group from another? Yeah, perhaps less difference than they used to be. Now that's intriguing not to say gnomic. Why do you say that? Why do you say that? You, you, it is just, your experience has been that people are treating other animals better over the years. Yeah. Yeah. And I know that many who spend their lives raising farm animals and death animals destined to be eaten, care very deeply about those animals. And making sure that their lives are actually happy. I also think there's a bigger blurring between people who own companion animals, as we would call them, and people who have what we would have previously called production animals. And there's an not awful lot of people in our area that have small holdings and they care perhaps for their horses, goats, dogs, chickens very similarly. Okay. So coming back to the business of how people are relating to treating animals, in many cases people are making lives better by design in the sense that they are devising ways of looking after them, whether it's food, whether it's shelter, uh, whether it's indeed treatment that seem to make their lives better. So in a way that's a sort of a parallel to the more obvious things that you do to treat animals with problems. Yes. And what, what we would call enrichment programs. A really important aspect I think, of animal care and husbandry. And that doesn't just mean for zoo species where you might immediately turn your thoughts to when you hear that, but also for domestic chickens and milking cows and things like that. Buildings and housing made more functional, more accessible is another good area of example. Yeah. Yes. Well, well, I was brought up in my early years around new market, uh, where there are more horses than people. Um, very often the horses were treated better than the people were, but that's not really what I'm, not what I'm on about. Um. Certainly in the case of value racehorses, I've been absolutely staggered to see some of the premises in which they live. Their training facilities, their treatment facilities. It's absolutely fantastic and, and it's always difficult when there's, um. Well, imbalance isn't perhaps the right word, but where you see money and time and thought expended on animals, any animals whilst there's a distinct lack of it with certain people and how do you find that? Do you find that difficult to deal with or is it just the way of the world? I think it's difficult because the money, the investment for infrastructure, culture and so on is from different sources, isn't it? I don't think it's at all wrong to put investment into a milking parlour, let's say that's functional, that can clean the cows, make it easy for the cow to leave. I don't think it's wrong for people to spend money on a really good quality ramp to help their dog get in and outta the car. That doesn't mean that I don't wish that there was more money available for people who urgently need it for medical care or housing, but mostly the facilities for horses and so forth is a private investment. Hmm. That sounded like a very diplomatic response where if I'm reading between the lines, it said, stop asking stupid questions, which is fair enough. Okay. Right. So in terms, uh, I'm not gonna hold you up much longer, I said around half an hour. And now a couple more questions though that I would like to put to you. I know that, uh, as I say Donaldson's, uh, as a practice, as a business is proactive about reaching out to owners and potential owners, giving them information so that it's not just a case of, oh oh oh, something's wrong. I better ring a or the vet. I mean, you help, you are helping to disseminate good treatment, good standards for animals generally, which is terrific. Do you see that fitting into any wider sort of framework of. Of how society operates with this type of thing. I'm not phrasing that very well, but I mean, for example, with architects, very often they're very isolated. They don't talk to other architects about the way to do things. I mean, sorry, they do, I mean, don't get me wrong, but a lot of offices, a lot of practices just operate on their own with their own agenda. They, they don't always fit into the bigger picture. What's it like? First of all, let's say with vets generally and, and secondly with your particular practice. Well, I think it sounds as if there's an awful lot more communication with us. Um, and obviously there is guidance through our official vet system. We have compulsory requirement for further training. All can access different forums. Some of us are part of special interest groups. Some of us will do like journal clubs and receive general email roundups of new publications. Um, there's also a lot of interchange between students who come and spend time here in practice. So we, you know, meet people who've been studying recently in different places, different universities. We all spend quite a lot of time really doing development, either at congresses or online. An awful lot of is that through meetings and discussion groups, we actually have all, have quite a lot of access to information and work together and share ideas effectively. You're giving me very diplomatic answers here. So no names, no pack drill, but are there any practices that you know of that you think are perhaps not quite up to scratch or could do with brushing up the procedures? Hmm. These days there's so much knowledge that no one individual can know everything. And so everybody tends to have an area of a special interest. Their expertise, there's quite a lot of interchange. Most, uh, vets are able to realize when they're outside their area and there's an established system to referral to, to get a second opinion. Uh, you know, there are clients who will want everything to be absolutely gold standard, and there are people who would like what they consider as being good old fashioned advice, and people have the liberty to choose to go anywhere. We almost all subscribe to schemes to assess us. We're part of the Royal College's Practice Standard Scheme, which is a voluntary scheme. We subscribe to. We, uh, we get inspected very regularly and there are a whole lot of areas of our practice that are independently regulated as well. Um, thinking for example, of the veterinary medicines director, I don't think there's really people out there who really don't know or are way behind. Mm. You are a, are being a very, as I say, diplomatic and very down the line interviewee. And of course, that's good to hear. Your professional standards are clearly being upheld, well, not just during surgery hours and office hours. It's a 24 7 attitude I think, that you take to the work. Now, that's okay. That's a comment. That's not a question. We all, we all make mistakes. You have to not make the same mistake twice. So you, you always have to be asking yourself if you've done the very best you could there or if there's something you could do better. Yeah, it's very sobering.'cause I mean, they always say that people have to live with architect's mistakes, whereas they can bury a doctor's mistakes. Yeah. It's flippant. But they do both have very serious consequences. So. Now it must just be coming up to the half hour mark. Uh, and I can tell you are not a hundred percent relaxed doing this, and I'm gonna let you go very soon. However, I cannot let any of my interviewees go without the last question, which is quite simple, really. What, if you had the ability, if you had the power to change one thing about society at present, what would that be? Or where do you think we have a problem that isn't being adequately addressed? I, I think that I would change the prevalence of social media. Particularly the widespread access that very young children have to it, because I think it's having quite a lot of influences on people at the time in their lives when they aren't able to avoid it or necessarily make good judgements about it. And that's in terms of the fact that independently of parents or teachers or anybody, they can sort of carry on a social life through social media. Without really having any understanding of how that fits into a context of a broader society. Yeah. And without necessarily having the skills or the education yet to be able to evaluate the information they come across and see whether it might be accurate or whether it might be unhealthy. And who do you think is in a position, uh, or, or should be in a position to do something about that. It's a hard one, isn't it? Yeah, it's a hard thing. Yeah, because I think parental controls won't entirely work, and it's difficult actually for the providers to be able to monitor everyone's thing that goes on in their platforms. But I don't really know enough about information technology to know if that's an accurate comment or not. I would just hope that kids could spend more time with real time experiences. Thanks very much indeed, Rhona, I know I did put you on the spot with this and you've come up Trump's Thanks very much indeed. I think we can call it a day at that for now and I hope I haven't traumatized you too much. As I say, I thank you. I thank you Rhona very much for that. Next time it's probably just gonna be me blathering on as usual. But then there is another guest coming up shortly who I think will perhaps have a very different perspective on things. If you have been. Thanks very much indeed for listening. And of course I'm always happy to hear any comments you may have on, on any of these episodes. Thanks again and good night, Rhona. Thank you.