Vetting Process
China’s small animal vets are far from meeting the soaring demands in both quantity and quality because of lagging education and incomplete industry regulations
Not until she queued for nearly two hours did Huang Zixuan finally see a vet for her sick turtle. “Someone in front of me had a sick rabbit and maybe there was a difficult problem, so the doctor asked some others to discuss it with him,” she told Newschina.
According to Huang, the hospital she turned to is a big comprehensive hospital that serves a wide range of pets, while many others can only treat dogs and cats.
“Many years ago, I brought my cat to the same hospital and found someone brought her pet duck there, and then I saw a doctor take out a thick book from the drawer and quickly look through something,” she said.
According to Zhang Xin, a vet in Shanghai, treating a cat or dog is just as hard as treating a person, let alone more niche pets like rabbits, lizards and turtles.
“There is a joke circulating among vets that human doctors are actually vets that can only treat one animal,” she told Newschina.
Along with the growing number of different pets in China, there are far from enough small animal vets to treat them all, especially since many previously specialized in farm animals, and graduate vets rarely receive enough clinical training.
“As for comprehensive skills, China’s pet medical care is 10 years behind the US, and the gap focuses on education and training,” Liu Lang, vice-president of the New Ruipeng Pet Healthcare Group, China’s biggest chain of animal hospitals, told Newschina.
Talent Shortage
Having worked as a vet in Shanghai since 2010, Guo Sen (pseudonym) from Taiwan has experienced how demand for pet medical care is soaring in the city.
The industry has been expanding even faster since 2015 when investment groups got involved, buying up practices
and veterinary groups. According to a report on the pet medical care industry issued by China Securities in November 2021, by August 2021, China had some 23,000 animal hospitals.
Yet qualified vets are in short supply. According to Liu, vets are so needed that a graduate in any related discipline can easily get enrolled in a course.
Guo found that the talent shortage has restricted the number of specialist vets – it is common for a young vet that has taken charge of a small hospital to not have specialized in any sub-field.
“Vets transfer between hospitals quickly these days. Because of the shortage and insufficient training, some young vets have to supervise an entire hospital only two years after they graduate,” senior vet Zhan Zheyu told Newschina.
A representative of a chain of pet hospitals told Newschina on condition of anonymity that a clinic is required to have only one doctor and one assistant plus six or above departments which cover a total area of 120-150 square meters, while a pet hospital requires three doctors and three assistants with eight to nine departments. Such an animal hospital only needs 500,000-800,000 yuan (US$71,600-114,560) to open.
The anonymous interviewee told Newschina that they can help employ medical staff for any clinic or hospital, mostly from agricultural universities, and they also support people transferring from other fields who will do the job after taking a training course the chain provides and sitting an exam for a license to practice.
Other clinics and hospitals can send their own vets to study at the chain’s training school. It lasts 45 days, including doing operations, analyzing examination indicators and dealing with disputes. Afterward, the trainees intern for one month in a hospital.
The interviewee complained that graduates majoring in vet-related subjects seldom choose to be a small animal vet, generally preferring to be a salesperson, a researcher at a pharmaceutical company or doing agriculturerelated work. The China Securities report cited statistics as saying that China has 78,000 licensed vets and 31,000 licensed assistant vets nationwide, but only 30 percent are engaged in pet medical care. In the US, it is 61 percent.
Mao Junfu, a cat disease expert at the Beijing-based Puppy Town Animal Hospital, told Newschina that when he graduated from university in 2000, he was the only student in his class that chose to be a small animal vet, and even those who go on to do post-graduate qualifications seldom enter the field of pet medical care. They prefer doing research at universities instead.
In May 2019, the Eastern and Western Small Animal Clinical Veterinarian Congress, a non-profit pet industry platform, published a report on pet medical care in China, revealing that 62 percent of those working in pet hospitals have a college degree or below, and 52.9 percent of them have less than five years work experience. In comparison, the US requires any vet to study in bioscience or animalrelated majors for four years before they apply for the three-year DVM (Doctor of Veterinary Medicine) course.
“Although China is keeping up with the US in the standard of degrees for human-disease doctors... it lags far behind in the educational degrees of vets,” Liu said. “In private animal hospitals, few pet doctors majoring in animal medicines engage in clinical treatment,” he added.
Gap in Standards
According to Lin Degui, a professor at the College of Veterinary Medicine under China Agricultural University in Beijing and director of the Small Animal Medicines Association under the China Agricultural Animal Association, China has around 200 colleges and universities with vet-related departments and they graduate some 15,000 vets every year. Although this is quite a large number, Lin estimated that only around 300 would be ready to treat an animal patient straight
away. Most need to continue training.
“Our vet education can meet the demand for farms, but it’s far from meeting the demand for small animal vets,” Lin told Newschina.
Lin said that international vet education has shifted focus to pets, since pets living in an increasingly better environment have seen their lifespans increase and their diseases are similar to those of humans. Therefore, vet students need to spend much more time learning about more diseases.
Yet, different from international practice, Chinese vet programs provide few courses related to small animals and pets. “Domestic universities seldom have special courses for pet medical care,” Mao of Puppy Town said.
Worse still, Chinese universities, according to Lin, do not value clinical experience. While the University of California, Davis, which has a world-leading vet school, requires a vet student to have at least 180 hours work experience before they apply for DVM courses, Chinese universities cannot even afford animals for experiments due to the rising costs.
“Graduates from vet-related majors usually need one to two years of training at a pet hospital before they can work independently,” Lin said.
Although some chain hospitals like New Ruipeng have their own training schools and training systems, most hospitals are single practices and have a limited number of patients, which make it hard to improve their skills. If vets want to improve their skills, they have to pay for courses themselves, and these can cost from 1,200-2,400 yuan (US$172344) a day, which scares many of them away.
Difficult Diagnoses
Despite the high tuition fees and their limited numbers, Chinese vets are not as well-paid and trusted by pet owners as American ones, according to interviewees.
Zhan Zheyu told Newschina that diagnosis and treatment in the US is very clearly classified, and difficult diseases are often transferred to specialist hospitals. In China, few hospitals transfer their patients, even though they cannot cure them. If there is a suspected medical malpractice issue, it is very hard for a pet owner to protect their interests and rights due to lack of laws and regulations.
Mao told Newschina that pet medical care in China only classifies pet hospitals by the number of staff and size of the premises. Most pet owners do not know which hospital specializes in which disease, and it also increases the difficulty for authorities to supervise and manage the industry.
“Classifying hospitals and doctors is very helpful in easing pricing issues, since vets can be paid based on their experience and qualifications, and pet owners can choose a hospital and a vet most suitable for them,” Zhan said.
Along with the development of the medical care industry, China is raising the bar for vets, with good universities increasing the minimum passing score for applicants and sending students for DVM training in the US.
The interviewees believe these young vets will bring overseas knowledge and experience back to China and gradually improve the industry.
“When I began as a vet in 2000, most vets at my hospital did not have a university education, with some others directly transferred from the farm animal field. But now, we have a growing number of master’s or doctoral degrees,” Zhang Xin told Newschina. “I believe that the fierce competition and increasingly diverse demands for pet medical care will gradually screen underqualified vets out,” he added.
Lin agreed, saying the growing demand will force society to improve the industry, such as working out more regulations, grading doctors and hospitals and improving medicine R&D and training for vets. Based on international experience, Lin forecasted that chain hospitals which have advantages in advanced equipment and more highly qualified staff will become the usual model for the development of domestic pet hospitals and in the next five years, 20 percent of pet hospitals will belong to a chain.
“The number of pets in China has shot up so fast that there isn’t enough time for the industry to cope with it. We need both time and funding to fill the gap,” he said.