A Practitioner's Approach to Anestrous

Abstract

This is a little bit awkward because Dr. Zemjanis, in his lucid, knowledgeable and comprehensive way, has covered anestrum very ably as he always does. I suppose this was intended to be the egg-head approach to anestrum and now you have a practitioner. I suppose I am supposed to tell it as it is and this is awkward because you know Dr. Zemjanis is also my boss and I am going to have to face him tomorrow and the day after; however, I think that probably the practitioner does have a little different attitude about problems such as anestrum. I think that it is one thing to know that functional anestrum is essentially a management-created problem. It is another thing to deal with it every day as a very real problem and still function effectively in the eyes of the people with whom you work. I think that practitioners regard anestrum as essentially a problem that is short lived, or quiet or invisible heats, or failure to observe, or failure to record. Even though we know this, we still have to approach it like the Rock Island Line-you know we have to ride it as we find it just as we do so many clinical situations in practice. Therefore, I think it is fair to say that as far as the practitioner is concerned, anything that we can do to increase our clients' attentiveness toward observation of heat and then anything that we can do to direct this increased attentiveness toward an animal is ethical and fair. Now, I am really qualifying what might be some deceitful attitudes-practice attitudes-about how we can con our clients in some situations into observing and, after observing, recording heats.