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"We
dance around a ring and suppose but the secret sits in the middle and
knows.”
“The
Secret Sits,” Robert Frost
My
friend and fellow advocate Barbara Albright has had this quote on her
site, Pocket's Story from New Hampshire, for years, but it was only
recently that I fully understood how it applies to incompetent, negligent vets. Here's how that happened:
At
a public meeting of the Texas Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners
(TBVME) in Austin, Texas, one of the board
investigators and I had a conversation I'll never forget: He told me
that whenever you see a vet reprimanded for violating recordkeeping
statutes, it's sometimes because there were other, more serious
violations, but the allegations were in effect “plea bargained”
down to recordkeeping. Because disciplined vets sign an Agreed Order – vets
have to “agree” to be disciplined – they and their lawyers do
whatever they can to get the final results to an outcome they can live
with – a little slap on the wrist, an "informal" reprimand, a “stayed” suspension
(meaning the vet doesn't miss a day of work), and/or a puny fine.
Of
course this board employee wasn't telling me anything that I and my
fellow advocates didn't already know. Even if vets have directly or
indirectly caused or contributed to the death of a pet, or great
harm was done, their goal is to obtain the least amount of
discipline to save face. Vets are rarely, if ever, disciplined only
for sloppy, shabby, incomplete records, never mind that such records
are a giant red flag as to what kind of truly inadequate, deficient
vet you're dealing with.
But faced with the choice of being held
accountable for malpractice and the death of an animal, and a “simple”
recordkeeping violation, they'll usually sign the Agreed Order for the latter. No big
surprise there.
So it occurred to me that probably the only time that a vet board system
can significantly “get” a vet (meaning the punishment is
commensurate with the severity of the violation) is if he or she
admits to wrongdoing, which I would imagine is pretty rare. Even in
cases like Suki's where the evidence is incontrovertible, his own
records in his own writing proving what he did and didn't do, Edward
J. Nichols of Crestway Animal Clinic, San Antonio, kept lying and
lying and lying at his informal conference in Austin, which I
attended and witnessed (he told some of the same lies, along with
some new ones, in his October 2006 deposition during his failed SLAPP suit against me). There were clear violations at every turn –
you can read Suki's Story and see her crappy records from Crestway Animal Clinic here, and how Nichols and Crestway got away with everything here.
I
pointed out to the investigator the travesty that occurred the day
Nichols waltzed out the door scot free, and he had to concede that if
a vet continues to lie it can make it more difficult to get beyond a certain
point in the investigation and on to the subsequent punishment phase.
Again, no big surprise.
But
it got me thinking. I said, “So it sounds like the only hope for
vet victims is for the vet to tell the truth about what he did.” If
so, this was really bad news. The system of “justice” at vet
boards depends largely on abusive, incompetent, negligent vets
telling the truth? The same people who mistreat, undertreat,
overtreat, mislead, misdiagnose, perform unauthorized procedures,
keep sloppy records, inflict substandard care, manipulate and lie, take our pets, our trust, and our money are now suddenly going to
tell the truth? Good luck with that.
Here's
where the investigator got all philosophical on me: “But what is
the truth?" he posed. "If a man is running down the street, seven different
people will have seven different versions of why he's running. One
could say he's running to catch a bus. Another could say he was
running from the scene of a crime he committed.”
I
listened to this rather strange explanation and said, “Yes,
witnesses could all say something different. But the running man
knows why he's running. He knows the truth.”
The
investigator wandered away shortly after that, maybe to think about
it, maybe to just get away from somebody questioning his “logic.”
I don't know.
But
here's what I do know: The veterinarians who have lied to us,
egregiously mistreated and in some cases killed our pets, who have
taken our companions, our trust, and our money – they know.
We
dance around, telling our stories, offering our evidence, proof and documentation to ears that will listen and some that
won't, and all these vets have to do is sit in the middle and know.
They're not just keeping secrets; they are the secret. In the same
way that we are forced to live forever with their atrocities, they
are forced to live forever as the secret in the middle – trapped by
their own lies, furious and frustrated, knowing that the people and
animals they have victimized will always be there, surrounding them
with the truth that they can never escape.
