Training almost 4,000 vets for a kinder standard of care

As part of our 20 Years, 20 Wins series marking two decades of ACTAsia’s work, win number twelve looks at a change that happens one clinic, one community at a time: the training of veterinarians across China through the Vets for Change  programme. #12 of 20

A profession without a welfare foundation

Animal welfare is a relatively new concept in China, and veterinary practice there is still very different from what it looks like in much of the rest of the world. In China, veterinary knowledge often stops at husbandry, the practical care of farm animals. Animal sentience and best-practice clinical care are often untaught, and reliable information on either is limited.

The profession’s standing reflects this gap. In the West, veterinary medicine is a competitive, high-status career, often chosen out of a love of animals and animal welfare education has itself only been part of veterinary training for the last two or three decades, since the University of Edinburgh became the first to introduce it in 1990. In China that history does not yet exist, and the social status of vets is lower. The result is a wide distance between what veterinary science elsewhere now treats as standard and what is taught and applied in much of China. 

ACTAsia recognised that without vets as allies, progress on animal welfare would always be working against, rather than with, the professionals upon whom animals depend the most.

Building the Vets for Change programme

These gaps show up in concrete ways. Keeping pets is itself a fairly new culture in China. University training gives little focus to companion animal issues specifically, and the growing number of unwanted animals in China has become a significant welfare problem in its own right.

ACTAsia launched its veterinary training programme Vets for Change in China in 2009, partnering with Vets for Compassion (VFC), an organisation founded by Dr Elaine Ong that runs international veterinary training alongside wildlife rescue and emergency response work. Together, ACTAsia and VFC built Train the Trainer (TTT), a model built on a simple idea: rather than training vets and stopping there, TTT trains vets to go on and train other vets. TTT teaches the full arc of humane animal care, from first contact through to recovery: handling, anaesthesia, surgical technique, and pain relief.

Since 2009, the Vets for Change programme has trained almost 4,000 vets and run 27 TTT workshops and 6 continuing professional development (CPD) workshops. In 2019, ACTAsia partnered with the World Small Animal Veterinary Association (WSAVA), an international body representing more than 200,000 veterinarians across 110 member associations in 87 countries, a partnership that has since allowed the training to reach further. In 2022 alone, ACTAsia reached over 2,000 vets through online CPD, with 50 completing the WSAVA Essentials in Clinical Decision-Making course.

Local vets leading local change 

The figure most significant to this win is the number of trainers it has produced. ACTAsia now has 31 certified Trainers working across eight provinces in China, vets who went through TTT themselves and now deliver it to their peers. “The biggest achievement is the sustainability,” Dr Elaine Ong says. This sustainability is accomplished through local ownership. After more than fifteen years of this work, the animal welfare problems facing Chinese vets are increasingly being solved by Chinese vets, trained and supported by ACTAsia rather than dependent on it. Every new trainer certified extends the reach of the programme without ACTAsia needing to be in the room.

“It is slow, but it holds,” says founder and CEO Pei Su. Progress built trainer by trainer, workshop by workshop, is progress that lasts, because the people carrying it forward are the same people living and working alongside the animals it’s meant to help.

A ripple that keeps moving outward

Nearly 4,000 trained vets and 31 active trainers represent a profession being reshaped from within by growing numbers of practitioners who now see welfare and sentience as central to good veterinary care, and who are passing that view on to their colleagues. This change compounds: each vet trained is a vet capable of influencing the next, and the next.

Veterinarians play a vital role in protecting companion animals, maintaining public health, ensuring food and environmental safety, and promoting welfare and owner education. As a WSAVA educational partner, ACTAsia, together with the Veterinarians for Compassion China team, continues to empower veterinarians through compassionate professional education, helping to build a new generation of vets who see beyond treatment to empathy, and beyond surgery to welfare. 

20 Years, 20 Wins 

To learn more about the Vets for Change programme, visit ACTAsia’s professional education page.

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