🎉 Happy Veterinary Technician Week!

Hello 👋 Welcome back to another edition of Weekend Rounds.

We are very happy to see we have some new members who have joined the best online veterinary community this week. So here’s a quick refresher of what we do:

• we provide high-quality and on-demand veterinary continuing education over on obivet.com 

• we round up the latest veterinary news, education, and entertainment and deliver it to your inbox once a week in this very newsletter

If you’ve been around for while, you know what we’re all about and we’re happy you’re along for the ride.

Alright, enough of that. Let’s get to it. Here’s what we’re covering today:

👩‍⚕️ 👨‍⚕️ Veterinary Technician Week
🐶 Online Symptom Checkers
💼 The Business Side Of #VetMed
💩 A Quick Game of Match the Feces
🚀 Quick Hits

👩‍⚕️ 👨‍⚕️ Happy Veterinary Technician Week 

Happy Veterinary Technician Week to all those who celebrate! Which, to be honest, should be all of you. Vet techs are essential to the success of our clinics and should be celebrated every day, not just during the first week of October.

As expected, there was a ton of great content tailored towards vet techs this week. Here are some of our favorites:

Plus, a new committee called The AVMA Committee on Advancing Veterinary Technicians and Technologists launched this week, with the goal of supporting vet techs to create practice success and job satisfaction. The AVMA also shared a list of resources including scholarships, grants, training programs and more for vet techs.

Don’t forget to tell the vet techs in your clinic how much you appreciate them 💜 

🐶 Online Symptom Checker

Chewy, in their quest to be the provider of just about everything (food, supplies, medicine, insurance, and more), has just launched an online symptom checker under their PetMD brand. We’ll be the first to admit that we are typically pretty skeptical of these types of things, but this one seems to pass an initial sniff test (pun intended).

The tool is for pet parents of dogs and cats who can select one of 52 pre-populated symptoms. After a few follow up questions, the system will determine if owners should seek veterinary care immediately, within a week, or not at all.

And most notably - if the answers indicate anything of note, the system will stop asking questions and tell owners to seek veterinary care, along with what to expect and some starter questions they can ask their healthcare team.

Here’s what it looks like for a dog presenting with a bloated stomach:

What do you think? Would you be willing to suggest clients use this online tool as a first step before seeking veterinary care?

💼 Walmart ramps up; EQT ponies up

A few weeks ago, we let you know that Walmart was entering the pet care market with the Walmart Pet Services Centre that offers veterinary care and grooming services inside existing locations. And it hasn’t taken long for key players in the retail industry to wonder if Walmart is uniquely positioned to disrupt the market. As pet owners seek increasingly lower and transparent pricing along with convenience, Walmart may be able to do it all:

• Pricing: they can drive prices down through scale economies and existing vendor relationships

• Growth: they already have the brick and mortar locations to support rapid expansion

• Convenience: they have a subscription service that allows pet owners to have essentials delivered automatically on their preferred schedule

What do you think? Will Walmart Pet Services be a dominant industry player in the coming years?

Plus: EQT, a Swedish private equity firm, has acquired VetPartners for over $1 billion dollars. That’s billion with a ‘B’, or the number $1,000,000,000. That’s a lot of zeros for the largest network of veterinary and animal health services in Australia and New Zealand. VetPartners operates 267 general practice clinics and employs more than 1,300 vets and over 3,000 nurses and clinical support staff.

💩 Guess Who?

We have absolutely no idea why The Guardian would publish a whole article dedicated to guessing which feces belongs to which species… but they did. And if there is one group of people who just maybe might be interested in that, it is all of you wonderful humans. So here you go: a fun little match game for you.

We’ll spare you the photos directly in your inbox, but if you want to check it out then be our guest.

🚀 Quick Hits

Here are some of the other stories we're following this week from around the veterinary world and animal kingdom:

Key legislation approved to support animal drug development [AVMA]

Reinventing emergency veterinary medicine [DVM360] 

Discover the science behind why there are no three-legged animals [A-Z Animals]

Vaccine hesitancy is a problem for dogs too, study finds - [Yahoo!]

Why do so many baby animals have spots? [Live Science]