The United States is marking its 250th anniversary this year, and the AVMA is using the moment to remind the profession that veterinary medicine has been woven into American civic life for nearly as long as the country has existed. The history is richer than most practitioners probably realize, and worth learning about. The full article is linked above, but here’s a quick snapshot:

The Founding Era. The Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, whose membership included George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Noah Webster, was formally calling for veterinary education as early as 1785. Benjamin Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, published an essay in 1808 arguing that the University of Pennsylvania's Medical School should establish a veterinary department. It took them until 1884, but the impulse was there at the beginning.

Early institutional struggles. The two veterinary schools operating before the Civil War, the Boston Veterinary Institute and the New York College of Veterinary Surgeons, were profit-driven private operations beset by undertrained faculty, poor admission standards, and what the AVMA delicately describes as "unethical behavior." What changed was the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, which funded state colleges focused on agriculture and the sciences. Iowa State opened the first public college of veterinary medicine in 1879, and it is still operating today.

Organized veterinary medicine dates to 1863, when 40 veterinarians from seven states founded the U.S. Veterinary Medical Association with the stated goal of "elevating the veterinary art." The AVMA, as it became in 1898, has now been part of American civic life for 163 of the country's 250 years.

The firsts woven into this history are also worth naming:

There are also the contributions to human medicine that tend to get overlooked: a veterinarian developed a method for setting fractures in dogs using metal pins in 1931 that was adopted into human orthopedic surgery by 1937.

We highly recommend the full article from the AVMA if you’re interested.

A rare medical feat is leading animal headlines this week.

A western lowland gorilla named Olympia gave birth on May 24 at Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo, which in itself is great news because the species is critically endangered, so every birth matters.

But this one was special for another reason - Olympia gave birth via emergency C-section. Fewer than a dozen gorilla C-sections have been recorded, which gives some sense of how unusual the decision was. The trigger was a combination of low amniotic fluid, intermittent fetal bradycardia detected by portable ultrasound, and confirmation of ruptured membranes.

The procedure was performed by a human medical team, including a neonatologist and an emergency physician from Swedish Medical Center and UW Medicine respectively. The ultrasound monitoring throughout was conducted using a Butterfly Network probe, a handheld device originally designed for human point-of-care imaging. The physician involved noted that gorilla fetal ultrasounds look strikingly similar to human fetal ultrasounds, which speaks to something practitioners working across species already know: the underlying physiology is often less different than the taxonomy suggests.

Post-operatively, Olympia was separated from the infant for the first night to recover. A gorilla keeper and veterinary technician cared for the newborn in an adjacent den, close enough that Olympia could see, hear, and smell her baby throughout.

Another postpartum gorilla named Jamani, who delivered her own infant six days earlier from the same silverback father, is currently caring for both newborns while Olympia recovers.

On a related note, and in the spirit of good news from the conservation front: on April 21, a Przewalski's horse foal was born at the Wildlife Conservation Society's Bronx Zoo. Przewalski's horses are the only truly wild horse species still in existence, and their recovery is one of conservation medicine's better stories. The entire living population, now estimated at fewer than 2,000 individuals, descends from just 12 horses. Zoo-bred animals were successfully reintroduced to China in 1989 and Mongolia beginning in 1992. The Bronx Zoo has been part of that effort throughout, and the new foal is part of a breeding program aimed at maintaining genetic diversity in the captive population.

A new global survey of more than 1,000 veterinarians across 51 countries, commissioned by Boehringer Ingelheim as part of its "Going Beyond" campaign, puts numbers to something most practitioners experience daily: the most important parts of the job are frequently the least visible ones.

Among small animal veterinarians surveyed, 87% identified detecting hidden health problems and pain as the most under-recognized aspect of their role. For equine practitioners it was detecting subtle early disease signs at 60%. Livestock veterinarians pointed to food-chain safety and disease surveillance, at 65% and 62% respectively. Across all three groups, the pattern is the same: the work that matters most tends to happen quietly.

Worth noting: this survey was commissioned by Boehringer Ingelheim, not an independent research body, and the "Going Beyond" campaign is an ongoing branded initiative co-developed with WSAVA, AAEP, WAB, and AASV. The figures are directionally consistent with other workforce research but should be read as industry-sponsored data rather than peer-reviewed findings.

The underlying point still holds, and the survey is a useful conversation starter when it comes to communicating value to clients and advocating for the profession more broadly.

For the past few years, most of us have interacted with artificial intelligence through a familiar little box: type in a question and receive an answer. But two recent announcements offer a glimpse of what may come next.

In April, OpenAI introduced GPT-Rosalind, a new AI model designed specifically for life-sciences research. Rather than being another general-purpose chatbot, it is intended to support scientific workflows across areas such as biology, genomics, protein engineering, and drug discovery. Access is currently limited to eligible institutions through a research preview.

Then, at Google I/O this month, Google announced information agents for Search. These are AI assistants that can continue working after you close the browser tab. Ask Google to “keep me updated” on a topic, and an agent will monitor it in the background and surface relevant information when it finds something useful.

These announcements are related. The next phase of AI may be less about asking a chatbot clever questions and more about delegating specific jobs to specialized tools.

Whenever there are new things on the horizon I usually ask myself what it means for our profession. Lots of announcements turn into failed experiments but many persist and change our day to day.

A research-focused model could help a veterinarian review the emerging literature on a given disease allowing vets on the ground to stay up today faster and in a more customizable way. An information agent might track a drug shortage, monitor a regulatory change, or send an update when new evidence appears on a controversial treatment.

There are important caveats. A tool that continuously monitors information can also continuously collect information. A specialized biomedical model may be more capable in a particular domain, but that does not automatically make its output clinically reliable. Privacy, validation, and human oversight become more important, rather than less important, as AI systems gain the ability to act.

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