This article originally appeared in the Dutch journal Psychologie en Maatschappij, Vol.68, No.3, 1994, pp. 248-260.
Preserving the Emotional Order: The Display and Management of Emotion in Veterinary Interaction
Joanna Swabe
Amsterdam School for Social Science Research
Emotion is a phenomenon which is generally relegated to the realms of individual experience and psychology, largely deemed to be unavailable to or undeserving of sociological investigation. There are, however, some notable exceptions to this rule. For example, during the early days of sociology, Durkheim and Simmel addressed the social organisation of emotion in their classic writings and, in later years, Elias (1994 [1939]) illustrated how the nature and bounds of emotional expression changed in relation to transformations in standards of conduct in sixteenth and seventeenth century European court society. More recent attempts to introduce a sociology of the emotions include Hochschild (1979; 1983) who has explored the nature of feelings and emotion management in her research on flight attendants in the USA, Denzin (1984), who examined the nature of emotion understanding from a symbolic interactionist perspective and Wouters (1991) who has investigated the influence of the `informalisation process' on the nature of emotional display in today's society in contrast to that of the past. Probably the most significant contributor to the sociology of emotions is, however, Erving Goffman. Throughout his numerous works on social interaction (eg. 1956; 1959; 1963), Goffman reveals the importance of emotion to the social organisation of everyday conduct. His astute analysis of face-to-face interaction manifests the incessant need that individuals have to regulate their own emotionality (1) and to refrain from openly displaying their feelings in the presence of non-intimates. Moreover, his writings expertly demonstrate the extent to which people are dedicated to the preservation of social order and the reproduction of normative standards of conduct in their attempts to preserve a non-emotional front in everyday situations (cf. Heath, 1988).
Drawing inspiration from Goffman's work, this paper seeks to further explore the way in which human emotion is socially and interactionally organised by examining some of the ways in which emotionality is recognised, displayed and managed in a specific interactional setting: the veterinary consultation room. The main aim of the paper is to examine the ways in which emotionally `delicate' situations are dealt with by participants in the course of veterinary interaction; most particularly during consultations which involve pet animal death, or the discussion thereof. These consultations often beautifully illustrate the way in which emotionality can skilfully be contained by individuals to prevent the breakdown of interactional order. Furthermore, an analysis of such consultations reveals that an understanding of and sensitivity to the emotionality of others is often crucial to the production and maintenance of orderly social interaction. It is, thus, my intention to illustrate the profoundly social nature of emotion and its importance to social organisation.(2)
Understanding Emotion
The issue of how emotion is felt and experienced by others is a very complex one. When observing episodes where emotionality is displayed, the question inevitably arises of whether it is in fact possible to perceive or describe it adequately at all. Without delving too deeply into the nature of emotion and its generation, one could easily conclude that the individual emotional experience - with all of its private sensations, inner feelings and corporeal reactions - is not readily or directly available to public scrutiny. When examining the emotional experience of others one can only assume, through the observation of the external manifestations of the emotionality of others and through introspection into one's own inner experience of emotion, that emotion is actually being felt by others. To be able to appreciate the emotion of an other, the individual observer is required to draw upon his own physical experience and imagination in order to empathise with the other who is apparently experiencing the emotion. Inner feelings and sensations - as they actually occur within the individual's body - are not directly communicable to others and cannot therefore be shared in any other way than by empathy. The very fact that it is possible to `emotionally empathise' with others in spite of the impossibility of directly and corporeally experiencing the actual emotion of the other indicates that emotion is not an entirely private matter. Moreover, since the recognition of the emotionality of others is based upon the way in which their emotional experience is expressed outside the body - in other words, it is externally displayed through gestures, facial expressions, etc. - it can be concluded that it is possible to participate in the emotional experience of others.
The ability to achieve emotional understanding or emotional intersubjectivity(3) is crucial to social organisation, most particularly in relation to face-to-face encounters for emotionality can potentially disrupt the interactional flow and render contact between individuals problematic. When emotion becomes an overtly public phenomenon, most particularly when the emotions being expressed are negative or problematic in character, i.e. when emotions such as sorrow, pain, anger, rather than euphoria come to the fore, it is essential that participants recognise and understand the emotional outpourings of others in order to produce appropriate future courses of action. It is the common stock of cultural knowledge and taken for granted, shared assumptions about the way in which the social world is, or rather should be, organised which informs the individual's actions and provides the basis for making sense of and reasoning about the actions and emotions of others. The assumptions that individuals have about themselves and their own conduct and emotion informs their interpretation of the emotionality of others. Furthermore, a commonsensical understanding of the situational and interactional appropriateness of emotional expression provides the individual with the ability to recognise the congruence or incongruence of another's (or his own) emotional display.
It is therefore important to orderly interaction that people are aware of each other's emotionality and that they are able to participate in, or at least orient to, that emotionality. One does not necessarily have to experience complete empathy with another in order to achieve a degree of emotional understanding. Individuals are in fact only required to participate in the emotionality of others to the degree that they are willing and able (Denzin, 1984, p.148). The extent of this emotional understanding is also dependent upon the relationship between the individuals involved in emotional episodes, in addition to their own individual biographical experiences of similar situations and emotions. As I shall later discuss, the publicly available character of emotion and the need for an awareness of and sensitivity to other people's emotionality can clearly be observed in the interaction between veterinarians and their clients, particularly during consultations involving pet death.
As the above discussion suggests, emotionality transcends the private sphere of the individual for it is a publicly observable social phenomenon in which others are able to actively participate. There is, however, a further and equally important dimension to the sociality of emotion which goes beyond and largely determines the emotionality that is experienced by individuals in interaction. Broader social constraints on the outward and public display of emotion greatly determine and regulate the nature of emotional experience in the everyday world. Moreover, there are clear social conventions which influence the way in which emotion is expressed. For example, the fact that it is considered to be appropriate to cry, rather than to laugh during a funeral. As a corollary to this, one could in fact argue that when confronted with a situation such as a funeral - or, in terms of my own research, a euthanasia consultation - which typically requires a particular socially appropriate emotional and physical response, such as sorrow (which is typically embodied by tearfulness), the failure to produce such behaviour may also generate social sanctioning; the individual who does not cry in response to the death of a close relative, friend or pet animal may well be perceived as being insensitive or indifferent to the latter's demise. This suggests that, in recognition of social conventions of emotional conduct, people may exaggerate or even fake emotion to avoid the potential social and moral sanctioning of others.
In former times, strong formal and institutionalised constraints were placed upon individuals with regard to public emotional expression, most particularly in relation to the way in which death and bereavement were dealt with. In recent years, such constraints appear to have gradually lessened, being replaced by a more individualised form of emotional restraint. It has been argued that over the years the forms of legitimate and acceptable emotional expression have diversified and become more varied. Emotional display has thus undergone a process of `informalisation' (cf. Wouters, 1991). One could say, after Elias, that a social constraint towards self constraint has replaced formal constraints upon individual conduct (Elias, 1994), that there is an expectation for individuals to curb their own emotional outpourings and to take into consideration the effect that their own conduct has upon others and themselves. In short, individuals are compelled to keep their own emotional states in check; failure to do so adequately can result in embarrassment or moral sanctioning.
Emotion in Interaction
In interaction, it is often crucial that one preserves a non-emotional front, particularly when the individuals with whom one is interacting are non-intimates with whom one has little in common or whose professional advice or services are required. There seems to exist a hierarchy of persons to whom one can turn in times of need, and with whom one can divulge intimate details or openly express emotions of a problematic character. Persons with whom one has a close personal relationship usually come at the top of the list: complete strangers generally at the bottom - that is unless one finds oneself in an exceptional situation when, for example, one really does have no one else to turn to (cf. Sacks, 1972) and must seek professional help in whatever shape or form. Consequently, when one finds oneself in emotionally distressing situations involving persons other than non-intimates, it is far from unusual to feel ill at ease. It could in fact be said that it is only `natural' to feel at ease during interaction. Feeling uncomfortable or embarrassed can be viewed as a `regrettable deviation' from this ordinary state (Goffman, 1956, p.264). It can thus be said that the individual's task in everyday life is to preserve this normal state of comfortability, at least as far as this is feasibly possible. Being emotional or being confronted with the emotion of another - particularly that of a virtual or complete stranger - is clearly in conflict with this task.
There are, however, situations where deviation from this normal, comfortable state of non-emotionality is not only perceived as expectable, but also warrantable and, therefore, acceptable (or at least tolerable). Situations which, for example, involve death or the receipt of bad news can be commonsensically categorised as occasions suitable for emotional display (cf. Wowk, 1989). Nevertheless, although such situations may be oriented to by participants as occasions where a degree of emotional display is quite legitimate, it does not necessarily follow that people will actually be able to deal with that emotionality as and when it occurs. Moreover, it appears that when individuals do display emotion under such circumstances, they will often become embarrassed and make apologies for their conduct in spite of the fact that their conduct is, under the given circumstances, quite reasonable. The euthanasia consultations which I have observed during my research provide a classic example of this tendency. Often when an animal is being euthanised, the client will become visibly upset or will begin to cry. When this occurs, the client will generally, upon her own initiative, attempt to pull herself together, producing or requesting tissues or a handkerchief upon which she can blow her nose and by taking deep breaths.(4) When attempting to suppress emotion or whilst tearful, the client will also usually avoid eye-contact with the vet. Sometimes clients will explicitly ask the veterinary staff's pardon for lapses in controlled conduct; often they will seek to vindicate themselves for emotional outbursts by telling stories about the (to be) dead animal's life and the relationship that they enjoyed with it in the past; in this way they seek to legitimise their emotionality.
In short, there appears to be a cultural preference (and necessity) for individuals to sustain an ordinary, non-emotional appearance in interaction, even under quite exceptional circumstances. One could indeed say that there is a need for individuals to constantly engage in reflexive self-monitoring (cf. Giddens, 1984); that people are required to be continually be aware of and purposefully orient to their own activities and emotional states in order to avoid the possibility of being sanctioned or becoming embarrassed by their own actions. This self-regulation of conduct reveals the extent to which people are dedicated to the preservation of self and social order. Moreover, it clearly demonstrates the way in which individuals strive to reproduce normative standards of (emotional) conduct in everyday life.
Emotional Encounters of the Veterinary Kind
Veterinary work is largely concerned with the prevention of animal illness, rather than the treatment of serious disease or the termination of animal life. The vast majority of patients that small animal practitioners encounter in their daily work are, therefore, more or less healthy. Animals are usually brought along to the veterinary surgery to either be inoculated, or for the treatment of minor infections and dermatological complaints. Owners may well be concerned about the state of their animals' health and can be somewhat nervous when they enter the consultation room, but it is seldom that the vet's diagnoses will lead to any cause for great concern and distress on the part of the client. The clients' apparent anxiety may well have as much to do with their unfamiliarity with being in a veterinary setting as their concern that there may be something wrong with their pet. Unless the animal patient's symptoms are manifestly chronic and indicate the diagnosis of a more serious complaint, the clients' apprehension will usually dissipate as it becomes evident that there is little amiss with their pet's health. In short, it is fair to say that veterinary encounters are typically rather `unemotional' and routine in character.
The majority of veterinary encounters involving small animal patients are thus generally rather uneventful and unremarkable. It will therefore come as no great surprise that in the course of my research, I have become particularly interested in veterinary encounters which involve pet animal death, or the discussion thereof. In my experience, such encounters tend to deviate significantly from the more routine contact that the vet has with his clients and patients. Moreover, these problematic consultations provide interesting fora for an examination of the way in which emotionality is dealt with in professional-client interaction as well as the emotional attachments that people can have with other non-human animals; the latter is not the explicit concern of this paper, although it is certainly an underlying theme which should be borne in mind when reading it.
The central problem upon which I shall focus in the following is the achievement of emotional understanding in such problematic veterinary encounters. Drawing upon my fieldwork observations, I shall briefly outline the ways in which veterinarians orient to client emotionality in situations involving pet death, and how vets and clients jointly attempt to constrain or circumvent it when it arises in order to get through consultations with the minimum of interactional disruption.
In the Company of Strangers: Preserving the Emotional Order
As I have already suggested, emotions such as grief and sadness - and the tears and sniffles which are the conventional physical manifestations of them - can be particularly problematic when expressed openly amongst non-intimates. Generally speaking, the vet and his client will be relative strangers, seldom crossing each other's paths during the course of the patient's life, that is unless the patient has suffered regular or prolonged bouts of illness.(5) The vet-client-patient relationship can thus be typified as one of non-intimacy. Moreover, the structure and form of veterinary encounters - at least those which occur in small animal practice - bear very close resemblance to conventional human medical consultations, most particularly to those which involve young children and their parents (cf. Strong, 1979; Ten Have, 1987).(6) A `professional distance' between the vet and his client also seems to be part and parcel of this, along with the other insignia that the vet often bears, e.g. the white coat and stethoscope, which signify his authoritative status and position. The client's understanding of the membership category `veterinarian' as being that belonging to a medical professional with whom one discusses veterinary medical issues and problems adds further to the absence of intimacy between the two.(7) The most significant repercussion of this (professional) detachment is that when confronted with an emotionally distressing situation - e.g. the (impending) death of a (cherished) pet - the client will demonstrate a reluctance to openly display emotion, choosing instead to repress or curtail it, or to make excuses for any lapses in controlled conduct that may occur. Akin to everyday interactional situations, there is a clear dispreference in veterinary interaction for the outward display of emotions, at least those which can commonsensically be categorised as problematic.
Maintaining a calm, controlled non-emotional appearance in interaction requires a great deal of reflexive self-monitoring, especially the face of adversity. The individual needs not only to sustain an outwardly ordinary front, but also is required to bestow each utterance she makes with sure meaning and to situate each remark and gesture in an appropriate position within the course of interaction. In other words, she must be as lucid as possible and talk when it is her turn - within the natural flow of a conversation - to do so. The individual has command of a vast, elaborate and refined repertoire which enables her to produce conduct appropriate to whatever situation she finds herself in. In this way, she knows - as a competent social actor - when, how, why and with whom it is appropriate, for example, to cry or, for that matter, laugh.
Generally speaking, as I have already asserted, the company of strangers is not the most fitting place to let the tears flow, even if an event such as the euthanising of an animal - which unavoidably occurs in the company of non-intimates - seems to be a legitimate occasion to do so. Moreover, if the individual fails to be calm and composed, most particularly within a situation such as the veterinary consultation where professional knowledge and services are being sought, interaction will be disrupted in such a way that the emotional individual will fail to adequately take in what she is being told by the very person whose very services she has requested (and is paying for). More to the point, she will have difficulty proceeding with the conversation and asking further, possibly essential, questions if she fails to adequately keep her emotions in check. When in an emotionally challenging situation, it is crucial for the individual not only to `save face' by curbing her emotions, but also to remain calm enough to participate fully in the interaction.
But what happens when an individual fails to keep her emotions in check? In the simplest terms, interactional breakdown occurs. Complete interactional breakdown rarely seems to occur in veterinary interaction; the emotional order is seldom disturbed so greatly that the communication between individuals is completely disrupted. In the course of my research, I have only witnessed one occasion where an individual was so overwhelmed that complete interactional breakdown took place.
This breakdown in interaction occurred immediately after a woman was the corpse of her dead Dwarf Poodle puppy, which had expired the previous evening - whilst under the veterinary staff's care - and had subsequently spent the night in the freezer. The staff had allowed the body to defrost a little and, prior to the client's visit, they had placed it neatly in a makeshift cardboard coffin lined with tissue paper. She already knew that her dog had died and the staff realised that she would be rather upset when she arrived. When she entered the surgery, the vet, attempting to create an air of solemnity, greeted her soberly, asked her whether she wanted to see the body - to which she agreed - and gently tried to prepare her for what she was about to see. One could best describe this case as an exercise in `emotional damage limitation'. However, this preparation was obviously not enough for taking one glance at the stiff little body in the box, the client gasped, cried out, burst into tears and fled the consultation room into the arms of her partner in the waiting room. After allowing her sufficient time to calm down, the vet attempted to entice both of them back into the consultation room. The need for them to return was further exacerbated by the entrance of another client who, quite unawares, walked into the waiting room and was confronted with the scene of two people clasping one another. From this scene, he swiftly turned away, displaying a high degree of disinvolvement so - as I have interpreted it - as not to intrude upon this private moment. The pair only entered the seclusion of the consultation room once they had been reassured that the corpse had been removed. After this initial interactional breakdown and repair, the consultation continued with no further interactional hiccups and the woman, whilst still a little tearful, constrained herself from further emotional outbursts.
One of the most interesting general observations that I have made of emotional display in the veterinary consultation room is that even when an individual `spontaneously' bursts into tears it often seems to be at the most interactionally appropriate time. For example, clients seem to display the most emotion when, during euthanasia consultations, the animal is given the anaesthetic which precedes the lethal injection; at this moment the client seems to realise that in a matter of minutes her pet will be dead. Talk between the vet and client often grinds to a halt during this part of the euthanasia consultation and the client will habitually be invited by the vet or his assistant to spend a final few minutes alone - often in the waiting room - with the anaesthetised animal. Leaving the client alone with her pet and her feelings is a very effective interactional strategy to avoid infringing upon, or becoming overly involved in, the client's emotionality. It also provides the client with the opportunity to enjoy a final intimacy with the patient and to outwardly express emotion that might otherwise be quelled out of embarrassment or discomfort if she were in closer proximity to the veterinary staff. Furthermore, it liberates the veterinarian, albeit temporarily, from having to deal with the (potential) emotionality of the client in this awkward situation.
It is also germane to here note that consultations which involve the euthanising of a patient or the post-mortem discussion of an animal which has died during an operation, post-operatively or under the vet's care - such as the one described above - generally take place outside of normal surgery hours. Scheduling such consultations in this way means that there are fewer pressures to rush them or to shuffle the patient out of the surgery in an emotional state. Furthermore, when there are no other clients and patients waiting to be seen, the client is spared from being exposed to further public scrutiny and possible embarrassment if she is seen crying in the presence of others apart from the veterinary staff. The practical organisation of such consultations seems to manifest the veterinary staff's sensitivity to the possible emotionality of the bereaved. Moreover, it reveals how potentially awkward situations are skilfully contained so as to exclude the involvement of any other individuals besides the client and staff. Such consultations are thus set aside as special and exclusive events: normally kept outside of surgery hours and away from the prying eyes of non-participants.(8) These practical arrangements effectively allow for the containment of emotion, at least in terms of physical space.
Preventing and Dealing With Infractions of the Emotional Order
Whilst the individual must seek to be the mistress of her own emotions in emotionally distressing situations, her co-interactants are also - whether they like it or not - obliged to participate in that emotion as and when it occurs or to encourage emotional constraint. In face-to-face interaction, as is the case in veterinary encounters, the participants are required to maintain the appearance of being fully involved in the interaction and to orient to the actions of fellow participants. Subordinate involvements (cf. Goffman, 1963) are also permissible within interaction, such as, for example, stroking the animal, preparing syringes etc., but the main interactional focus of each participant should really be upon the other. The veterinarian must therefore be extremely attentive to his client's needs and able to gauge just how upset she is. He must be able to anticipate the client's potential responses to the situation at hand, even before the client has actually entered the consultation room. When tackling such consultations, and in order to achieve a degree of emotional understanding with the client, the vet attempts to establish a `frame of seriousness' (cf. Sudnow, 1967), to complement the client's definition of the situation as being one of great personal import. In this way, he will appear to display empathy with the client's predicament and will attempt to participate in her emotionality by treating her with `kid-gloves'.
The way in which the conduct of the veterinary staff differs before the client arrives and after she has departed provides a good illustration of this. For example, when an animal has been euthanised, its corpse will not be removed from the place - usually the examination table - where it was `put to sleep' until the client has left the room and taken proper leave of her dead pet. The staff neither rush the client to leave, nor do they usually touch the animal - aside from maybe rearranging the corpse a little. They generally remain silent, or furnish the client with a few kind words, usually along the lines that they have `done the right thing' by putting the animal's suffering and pain to an end. Some clients may decide to bury the dead animal themselves, the majority of corpses, however, are stored at the surgery to be collected by the city council or the local crematorium for destruction.(9) Once the client has left the building, the animal is quite unceremoniously stuffed into a plastic bin-liner and then put in the freezer. On one occasion, a Rottweiler that had just been euthanised was far too large to be put in a bin bag or the freezer. Instead, seconds after his tearful owners had left the consultation room, his huge corpse was folded in half by the assistant and crammed into a plastic crate, which was left outside the back door of the practice. The departure of the client in such situations seems to signal a return to `business as usual' for the staff, the need to tread on eggshells is over and the remaining practical tasks concerning the patient can be carried out with the minimum of fuss.
The above seems to suggest that when the client enters the consultation room that veterinary staff are engaged in some kind of `performance'. In Goffman's terms, they could seen to be playing the part of sympathetic professionals who are trying to convince their audience, the client, that they are sincere and understanding of her plight. But is this really a masquerade? To some extent one could argue that this is so, the `face' that the vet wears and the language he uses in the presence of the client is often quite different to that which he wears when he is `behind the scenes'. However, I think it misleading to imply, as would Goffman, that in their emotion management the participants in veterinary encounters are necessarily engaged in `theatrical performance' (cf. Goffman, 1959). Making such dramaturgical analogies potentially trivialises the individual's very real concerns to appear sympathetic to the other or, in the client's case, to maintain a non-emotional appearance. Furthermore, such an approach underestimates people's reasoning practices and their methods for managing their mundane activities. To use theatrical language, e.g. backstage/frontstage analogies and to treat the individuals involved in interactional encounters as actors - although interesting in descriptive terms - does not necessarily reflect the way in which people see themselves and their activities. Thus whilst it may be true to say that the conduct of the veterinary staff in the presence of clients may be very different from that when they are alone, it does not necessarily follow that they are `putting on an act'.
The old adage that prevention is better than cure reflects not only the nature and aims of veterinary work, but also the style of emotional management which veterinarians employ in dealing with their clients. Although emotional self-restraint appears to have been internalised and integrated into our repertoires for producing appropriate everyday conduct, in face-to-face interaction fellow interactants must often lend a hand in curbing the emotion of an other. Emotion management can thus be seen as a process of negotiation between the individual who is experiencing the emotion and the other who is confronted with having to participate in it.
For the veterinarian, being a good emotional negotiator has little to do with his professional competences. Vets receive precious little training with regard to how they are supposed to deal with clients interactionally and consequently their manner of handling clients in challenging situations is largely ad hoc. The way in which vets are able to deal with the emotionality of their clients is very much dependent upon the personality of the individual vet and his social and interactional competences. Whilst vets may have a high degree of expertise in preventing and curing animal illness, it does not necessarily follow that they will be able to deal with client emotion adequately.(10) An examination of these ad hocing practices would reveal the many and varied strategies which veterinarians adopt in order to deal with the emotional outbursts of clients. Unfortunately, in a cursory solicitation such as this, there is neither time nor space to discuss these adequately. However, in the above, I hope to have given a general impression of how emotions are managed in the veterinary consultation room.
Conclusion
Maintaining the emotional order is an ongoing activity in which individuals are routinely and jointly engaged. The emotional constraint and negotiation discussed above is certainly not unique to veterinary interaction, but is instead illustrative of a far broader social phenomenon that can be found in whatever interactional setting one cares to look. In my discussion I hope to have demonstrated that emotion, at least insofar as it rears its head in interaction, is profoundly social in nature and plays a crucial role in the way in which people routinely relate to one another in an orderly fashion in everyday situations. And, whilst my own contribution to the sociology of emotion is but small, I hope that I have been able to demonstrate that emotion is a phenomenon which is certainly fit for and highly deserving of future sociological investigation.
Notes
- The term emotionality refers to the process of being emotional.
- The data upon which this discussion is based are derived from a far broader research project concerning the relationship between humans and other animals. In short, this project explores the ways in which animals are used to serve human interests, be they economic or affective, and the manner in which they are serviced by veterinary medicine to be able to do so. This research is based largely upon ethnographic data which I have collected in a variety of veterinary settings, both urban and rural, in the Netherlands.
- These two terms have been borrowed from Denzin who uses these two terms more or less interchangeably in his work on emotion. He defines emotional intersubjectivity as `the interactional appropriation of another's emotionality such that one feels one's way into the feelings and intentional feeling states of another' and emotional understanding as `knowing and comprehending through emotional means, including sympathy and imagination, the intentions, feelings and thoughts expressed by another' (Denzin, 1984, p.282).
- Throughout this paper, I shall generally refer to the client in the feminine. This choice has little to do with the supposition that women are more `emotional' than men, instead it is due to the fact that the overwhelming majority of clients who visit the veterinary surgery, particularly during the day, are women. Likewise, the majority of veterinarians are male - although in small animal practice this situation is changing due to increasing numbers of women entering the profession, often to practice this veterinary speciality specifically - and will thus be referred to in the masculine.
- In larger urban areas, clients do not always visit the same practice each time their pets become ill or require inoculation. The urban vet-client relationship is thus often not long-term and can be characterised by a high degree of anonymity. In contrast to this, the relationship between vet and client in rural areas is slightly more intimate in nature. The client is more geographically restricted in her choice of practice and the vet is often a well-known figure in the small community where he lives or works. Nonetheless, in a rural situation, the vet may still not encounter the client in a professional capacity all that frequently, in spite of a potentially greater familiarity between the two.
- This semblance is in fact very significant and an examination of the interaction between vets, clients and patients would provide an ideal opportunity to test the popular claim that people often treat their pet animals like (or better than) children. Such a comparison is, however, limited solely to the veterinary treatment of small pet animals: the closest analogy to the way in which agricultural animals are examined, treated and terminated is the way in which motor vehicles are inspected, repaired and sent to the scrap-heap.
- Even when familiarity between vet and client exists - as I have observed when friends or family have visited veterinarians for counsel on veterinary matters - both parties clearly orient to each other as professionals and clients and behave in much the same way together as do vets and clients who are less well-acquainted.
- One could also argue more sceptically that such practical arrangements are made as much for the veterinarian's benefit as the client's. Having emotionally distressed clients wandering through crowded waiting rooms is not exactly good for business, nor is it a good advertisement for the vet's proficiency as an animal healer!
- When the client opts for the body to be disposed of by the council, the vet, whilst mentioning that the animal will be cremated alongside many others, always omits to tell the client that her once cherished pet would be rendered down and the remains used for, for example, fertilisers and animal feed. Providing such information would doubtless upset the client greatly and is best kept as `inside knowledge' in such situations.
- Interestingly, several of my veterinary informants have remarked that people often opt to study animal rather than human medicine because they feel that their bedside manner would not be up to scratch. Ironically, veterinary practice involves a high degree of human contact and requires a great deal of social competence; something which veterinarians - according to my informants, rather than my experience - are sadly lacking.
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