The incredible declawing Dr Pol is incredibly incompetent and cruel

Dr Pol is an old-school American vet who not only believes declawing cats is fine but also believes he can do the operation in a careless and unsanitary way. It is compounding cruelty in carrying out an unnecessary operation with carelessness. We know he is careless with respect to following standard veterinary procedures because a second complaint has been filed against him by a fellow veterinarian, Eden Myers DVM.

The second complaint to the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs has occurred while Dr Pol is serving probation for the first complaint (as I understand it). He was fined and ordered to complete further education the first time around.

What is incredible is that Eden Myer’s complaint concerns Dr Pol’s performance on his National Geographic television show called “The Incredible Dr Pol”. He is incredibly bad by the sound of it.

Dr Eden says:

“I checked the Michigan Veterinary Medical Association (MVMA) standards and saw that the practices I watched in the show were not acceptable. Our clients and potential clients can watch this and it’s representing substandard care. It does the public a disservice,”

On that reality television show he is seen to be performing surgery on a dog hit by a car. The intention, I presume, in televising this is partly to promote the veterinary profession but he achieved the exact opposite. He brought the profession into disrepute with numerous errors according to Dr Eden. The list is too long to go over on this page but he does have a cavalier approach to hygiene and on all accounts lacks sensitivity and awareness of the welfare of his patients.

For instance, the second complaint states he failed to wear sterile surgical attire and failed to use sterile draping in the operating room. Under guidelines, Dr Pol should have worn a gown, cap and mask and he should have used sterile instruments in a sterile field.

These are basic requirements surely? Under the complaint, Dr Pol’s work fell short in many other areas too.

In the earlier complaint numerous breaches of procedure were cited including a failure to read an ultrasound correctly and failures to manage his practice adequately, for example: a failure to ensure that his staff kept adequate documentation of telephone calls, treatment records etc..

I don’t want to go over all the complaints here. You can read about the second compliant on this website.

Marcia a visitor who has watched the television show and has knowledge says:

“He rarely uses a drape around a surgical site, for example (and I’m not talking about field work, just the in-hospital stuff). I’ve only occasionally noticed him pulling on a pair of gloves, either sterile surgical or exam gloves, which means he can easily pass a disease from one animal to another. His answer to antiseptic technique is very old school barnyard — stitch it up and flood it with antibiotic powder or spray. In a recent episode, I watched him take a culture from a cow eye and transfer it to a sterile plate of what looked like blood agar. All well and good, except the plate was exposed to the air for quite a long time and probably contaminated. The list of poor techniques just grows and grows. He keeps his show because he’s an egotist and buffoon and that makes good television. But he’s not a particularly good vet.”

Dr Pol is being investigated and there is a Facebook petition to drop him from the National Geographic show or drop the show entirely.

My interest in Dr Pol is his declawing of cats. He is said to be an old-school vet. Declawing should be a thing of the past. It is a cruel operation carried out cruelly by this vet. Declawing belongs to the history books. It should be stopped as soon as possible.

The attitude of all veterinarians who do it is old-fashioned. It is an attitude which says that cats are “only cats”, barely one up from the toaster in the kitchen.

The behaviour of Dr Pol supports this insensitive approach to animals. He is not fit to be vet because vets must at least have an empathy towards animal welfare. That must underpin all they do but it doesn’t, does it?

Declawing itself when done at the behest of the cat owner for her convenience is automatically in breach of the standards and guidelines of veterinary work in the USA. This appears to be overlooked in the complaint because declawing is mainstream legalised cat cruelty on a grand scale.

Dr Pol’s public humiliation is actually a failure in itself because all vets who declaw – and nearly all of them do – should be humiliated in exactly the same way.