A vet trainer honoured on the world stage

As part of our 20 Years, 20 Wins series marking two decades of ACTAsia’s work, win #13 puts a face to one of our longest-running programmes: Vets for Change. In 2018, the World Veterinary Association’s Animal Welfare Awards recognised Dr Yin Zhijuan, who now leads ACTAsia’s vet trainer team in China, for her outstanding contribution to protecting and promoting animal welfare best practice. #13 of 20

The award is well-earned and testament to the power of ACTAsia’s ‘ripple-effect’ professional training model. The win is encapsulated in the story of how Dr Yin got to this point. 

Where Dr Yin started

Dr Yin trained and began practising as a vet in a third-tier Chinese city in Guangxi province, far from the professional networks and specialised training more established vets in larger cities could access. Like many vets of her generation, she also navigated a profession that was not always taken seriously in her community. It was a gap felt beyond her own career, too: Chinese veterinary schools have historically exclusively taught clinical skill, without teaching that animals are sentient beings who have their own needs and feelings, a concept that ACTAsia’s professional education programme set out to change.

Joining Train the Trainer

Dr Yin joined ACTAsia’s Train the Trainer (TTT) programme in 2009, delivered in partnership with the Australian organisation Vets for Compassion. Though Dr Yin came into the TTT programme as a highly experienced veterinarian (she opened the Nanning Arong pet hospital in 2008), she spent her first year in the training solely in observation. The hands-on, welfare-focused approach that ACTAsia introduced was incredibly different from what she had learned. She returned the following year to undergo ACTAsia’s training for a second time, this time able to get experience operating and managing animals as well, and that decision marked the turning point in her career.

Today, the Train the Trainer programme has trained close to 4,000 vets across China in animal welfare and care, part of a wider network of Vets for Change trainers now operating in 21 cities nationwide.

Leading from the front

“I’m proud to be part of a programme that trains more and more vets, who spread ripples of compassion further and further into China,” Dr Yin has been quoted saying. 

Dr Yin is now head of ACTAsia’s operations training, shaping how the next generation of Chinese vets learns to treat every patient with skill and compassion in equal measure. She has led training in remote Qinghai, and each year she travels – often alone – to check on dogs in rural Guangxi, an area with one of China’s highest rabies risks. Drawing on what she learned through ACTAsia’s training, that vaccination, not mass culling, is the most effective way to control rabies, she has run vaccination clinics in her own home village, work she began entirely on her own initiative.

It is a level of ownership that captures the whole logic behind ACTAsia’s Train the Trainer model: real change takes hold when local professionals carry it forward themselves..

Why this win matters

Speaking at a recent ACTAsia veterinary workshop in Chengdu, Dr Yin described her work as follows: “Our mission is to help veterinarians see every patient not just as a case, but as a sentient being deserving of comfort and respect.” 

Dr Yin’s path – from a young vet with no access to welfare-focused training, to an internationally recognised leader training others – is what ACTAsia set out to make possible when Vets for Change began. Awards validate the model from the outside. Stories like hers prove it from within.

As Pei Su, ACTAsia’s Founder and CEO, puts it: “Dr Yin is living, walking, breathing proof of creating sustainable change through education.”

20 Years, 20 Wins 

Learn more about ACTAsia’s awards and recognitions and find out how you can get involved in the compassionate movement. 

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