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Following our note on rural practice, we are now going to take a look at small animal care.First of all, the Atlas data show that 14,360 veterinarians (79.4% of all vets) state that they are skilled in looking after dogs, cats and other types of pet.&#160;&#160;Among these small animal specialists, we find slightly more women than men – 7,546 as against 6,814.The data also highlight the fact that female canine vets are more often salaried employees than is the case for their male counterparts, though it is impossible to determine whether this is simply an age effect: women vets tend to be younger, and the average career generally involves starting off as an employee.&#160;A recent practiceAs we mentioned in our previous note, small animal practice is a recent invention in the history of the profession, only really coming into being in the 1960s, at the same time as pets’ new family status (Hubscher, 1999). The evolution of this group of professionals towards small animal care has therefore been swift. Yet this massive change has not aroused the same level of interest as the decline in rural practice; we find very few governmental or professional debates or reports on this matter, nor are there many social science articles. Regarding the case of Great Britain, Andrew Gardiner (2014) sets out a new chronology for the emergence of small animal practice, by taking into consideration the role of charitable organisations during the interwar period. He also shows how this evolution in veterinary practice took place against the will of the profession itself: representatives of the profession disputed the social utility of this new activity, and vets who cared for small animals were commonly referred to as “feeble”, compared to those “of us who have a real job of work to do” (as one young veterinarian wrote in 1939, quoted by Gardiner, p.20). The issue of small animal care arose in the 1920s due to the poverty in the population: what can one do, what should one do, with the animals (dogs in particular) which belong to poor people and which are constantly growing in number? Whilst the veterinary profession was taking no interest in this less than noble cause, a charitable organisation founded and run by a woman - Maria Dickin – decided to tackle the problem. The organisation - People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals of the Poor (PDSA) - opened animal clinics and offered to treat animals for free, as can be seen from its brochures: “Bring your sick animals! Do not let them suffer! All animals treated. All treatment free”. By 1926-27, backed by British nobility, the organisation had already opened 57 clinics and set up three travelling units. Treatments were provided by specialist technicians who were not veterinarians. In order to train the latter, in 1928 the PDSA opened a school, and the training equipment was among the best in the kingdom. Following the creation of the school, the organisation continued to expand its activities: in 1931 the PDSA claimed to have treated one million animals.&#160;[embed]https://youtu.be/3A1mMVDL4oo[/embed]&#160;The veterinary profession, which had until then regarded the initiative with the disdain reserved for the whims of “childless women”, began to worry, especially given the relatively unfavourable context. Andrew Gardiner notes that veterinarians went through a period of uncertainty regarding the future of the profession, due in particular to the change in status of their emblematic animal, the horse, and to the decline in the equine population. Following a period of extremely tough confrontation between veterinarians and the charity, reconciliation took place as from the mid-1930s: the PDSA’s dispensaries recruited vets to supervise their technicians, and in zones where there were no clinics veterinarians were paid by the organisation to care for animals owned by the poor. This agreement became formal in 1939, at a time when the organisation had completed its expansion – it now ran more than a hundred dispensaries and hospitals throughout Great Britain, where it was very popular. However, despite the fact that the agreement had been negotiated by the leaders of the profession, it was fiercely opposed by the vast majority of vets. As the Second World War began, these intra-professional conflicts and controversies remained unresolved. They would be ironed out on new terms after the war.Reading this fascinating article, one can only regret that there is no equivalent in France, where little is known about the emergence of small animal practice… Did the issue of the animals of the poor play a role in the development of small animal medicine? Was the veterinary profession opposed to this practice?&#160;Veterinarians, their clients and their patientsSociological literature on this subject takes a very different approach: it focuses mainly on descriptions of everyday life (the day-to-day running of veterinary surgeries, relations between vets and their assistants or between vets, owners and animals) and of the actual work done by vets (this research devotes considerable space to euthanasia: we will be writing a special note on this subject).For sociologists, research on veterinary consultations is of general theoretical interest in that it examines the animal’s place in the interactions. Indeed, most works adopt a symbolic interactionist approach, but highlight the need to develop it by taking account of the animal’s role (and not just that of the human beings or the objects) in the interactions. Clinton Sanders’ work is particularly representative of this movement. In this note we present his research which examines the concrete realities of veterinary practice and which is the foundation for a more general contribution to the development of Animal studies.The first article (1994), based on participant observation over several months, examines interactions during consultations and attempts to characterise the types of client who are “problematic” for veterinarians. C. Sanders bases his paper on a very general result concerning the service professions: their members judge their clients to be good or bad based on whether they facilitate or hinder their activity. In the veterinarian’s case, one must make the distinction between the patient, who cannot speak, and the accompanying person who pays for the consultation. C. Sanders identifies 5 categories of problematic client. First and foremost “ignorant” clients who do not possess the knowledge required to take proper care of their pet. Because they have trouble understanding their animals’ behaviour, they find it hard to control them and do not think to warn the vet that they might become aggressive, with the result that surgery personnel may be bitten or scratched. Veterinarians deem such clients to be difficult because they have to spend time giving them information about their pet and educating them so that their interactions may improve. Some cases are cause for amusement, such as the client who did not know that her cat could have fleas… The second category of difficult clients concerns all those who make demands that cannot be met, who think that they know better than the vet or who question his/her expertise by disputing the diagnosis or by demanding to see another of the surgery’s veterinarians. The third category is that of clients who are negligent or indifferent towards their pets, which means that they are in a pitiful state when brought to the surgery, due to a lack of care. The fourth category contrasts on almost every point with the latter in as much as the clients are too involved and behave in a manner that is not suited to an animal: the dogs or cats are pampered, they are brought to the surgery for no real reason, the client uses a wealth of detail to explain the reason for the visit, which can make it harder to make a diagnosis because it is difficult to extract pertinent information from the never-ending stream of words. Clients of this type are nevertheless simply deemed to be eccentric – whilst they require special attention, they have the merit of loving their animals. The last category gathers all clients whose conversation is focused on consultation fees and try to negotiate to reduce veterinary bills.In 1999, once again observing activities in the same veterinary surgery, C. Sanders focused on the patient and no longer on the client, developing a new typology, this time for animals. This shift clearly marks the evolution of the author’s sociological thinking, with him going on to develop research projects that gave evermore space to the human-animal relationship.&#160;This time he places at the heart of his thinking the uncomfortable situation in which veterinarians find themselves; they must act for the well-being of their animal patient whilst at the same time satisfying the needs of their human client - who is a fellow human being, who has come to them for help and who is paying the bill.Sanders begins by identifying the factors that influence veterinarians’ relationships with their patients: whether they have known them for a long time or whether they are seeing them for the first time; their symptoms and the reasons why they have been brought to the surgery; the animal’s race and behaviour; the unusual or ordinary nature of the case they represent. On this basis, the difficult patients are first of all those which cannot be controlled, which try to escape, which bite or scratch and which behave in manners that make it impossible for them to be properly examined. The patients are almost never held responsible for such aggressiveness, which is deemed to be the result of a stressful situation, of physical discomfort, of poor education by the owner or of other factors outside the animal’s control. The second category of difficult patients is that of dangerous animals. C. Sanders highlights the fact that veterinary work is physical and that surgery personnel are often hurt, but that they tend to downplay their injuries and only consider cases to be serious if someone has to go to hospital. In order to prevent such attacks, animal behaviour is noted on the files, thus allowing the personnel to better prepare and to protect their arms and hands during later consultations. The third category of difficult patients is defined by their behaviour: whether they urinate, have diarrhoea, bleed, expulse secretions the smell of which will follow the vets all day long, or have been diagnosed too late with a zoonotic disease – in which case they represent a source of contamination. The final category of problematic patients is that of animals who are going to die, either because they are brought too late to the surgery and cannot be treated, or because no diagnosis can be reached. In such cases it is disappointment and sadness that affect the staff. Such situations almost never involve the owners, who are rarely held responsible for the state of their pets, except in cases of manifest mistreatment or negligence.Successive reading of these two articles by C. Sanders, which pay a lot of attention to practices and interactions in veterinary consultation, allows us to see how the sociologist’s approach has evolved from the observation of interactions involving human beings to the analysis of human-animal relations.&#160;Life in veterinary surgeriesAmong the articles on small animal practice we also find research that sees veterinary surgeries as organisations and examines the division of labour and hierarchical relationships; this leads them to look at the other groups of professionals that work with veterinarians – veterinary technicians in particular. We have already discussed this aspect in the note on rural practice, using L. Hamilton’s study of a mixed practice in Great Britain (Hamilton, 2013). We continued these reflections with a new article by C. Sanders (2010) on the “dirty work” done by veterinary technicians. The majority of the veterinary technicians he observed were women, and more often than not they had learned on the job – though he notes that some colleges and universities have introduced training courses. In this research he explores a classic theme of the sociology of professions: E. Hughes (1996) showed that all jobs have a “dirty work” dimension, i.e. unpleasant aspects. Some professions give people the opportunity to transfer their share of the dirty work to other professional groups (in this case veterinarians to their technicians); the members of these other groups, who have fewer qualifications and a lower level of prestige, have to make do. How the latter deal with the unpleasant side of their work is a preoccupation central to the sociology of professions of interactionist inspiration. First and foremost, C. Sanders highlights the different aspects of the dirty work done by veterinary technicians, from cleaning, through to the moral support given to clients: it is a matter of coping not only with filth, excrement and a whole range of dirty and smelly bodily fluids (blood, urine, pus, etc.), but also with the bodies of animals that could not be saved or which were euthanized in the surgery. He uses the expression “emotional dirty work” to describe activities that involve strong emotions, often grief, sadness or anger when dealing with the death of an animal, or with their suffering or that of their owners. Compensation for this aspect of the job is found in their love of animals and in the teamwork, with the vets, to treat and save the pets. C. Sanders also points out that this love of animals extends to the technicians’ personal lives, with many of them adopting patients from the surgery where they work, either because they have been abandoned or because their medical condition requires specific care (they are blind, have chronic illnesses, etc.). The relationship with the animals is thus a central factor in compensating for the dirty work that has to be done in a veterinary surgery.Now that this note is finished, we can see that it presents the results of a very small number of authors and, regarding the analysis of veterinary activity, of C. Sanders in particular. Yet the perspectives that this research provides are worthy of new studies in a French or even European context.&#160;ReferencesGardiner, 2014, The ‘dangerous’ women of Animal Welfare: How British veterinary medicine went to the dogs, Social History of Medicine, 27, 3, p. 466-487.Hamilton, 2013, The magic of mundane objects: culture, identity and power in a country vets’ practice, The sociological review, 61, p. 265, 284.Hubscher, 1999, Les maîtres des bêtes, Les vétérinaires dans la société française, (XVIIIe-XXe siècle), Paris, Odile Jacob.Hughes, 1996, Le regard sociologique, Paris, Editions de l’EHESS.Sanders, 1994, “Annoying owners: routine interactions with problematic clients in general veterinary practice”, Qualitative Sociology, 17, 2, p. 159-170.Sanders, 1999, Understanding dogs. Living and working with canine companions. Philadelphia, Temple University Press.Sanders, 2010, “Working out back: The veterinary technician and “dirty work””, Journal of contemporary ethnography, 39, 3, p. 243-272.