A new mentorship collaboration 🤝

Hello 👋 This is Weekend Rounds. Your weekly breath of fresh veterinary news and animal happenings. You’re busy, we’re busy. Let’s cut right to the chase. Here's what we're covering this week:🤝 Mentorship supercharged ✈️ Jet Setting Sphinx 🐘 Pakistan’s zoo troubles 🚀 Quick hits

Mentorship Supergroup 

This past week the AVMA and MentorVet announced a new partnership. MentorVet Connect is a structured mentorship program that connects early-career veterinarians with trained mentors who can offer invaluable support and guidance, providing new veterinarians with free access to an established and proven mentoring platform. MentorVet Connect is designed to create one-on-one connections between veterinarians, offering support to early-career veterinarians by pairing them with trained mentors in a similar practice type. Together, the mentor and mentee create a customized mentoring plan that best suits the mentee’s needs. 

Jet Setting Pets

Pet owners seeking to transport their pets on commercial flights must navigate a patchwork of rules that vary by airline. Service animals are allowed to be in the cabin and left unconfined, but other animals are subject to size restrictions that require bigger pets to travel as cargo. Many owners of larger dogs fear what might happen to pets shipped as cargo. And fair enough. We’ve seen snakes on a plane.

One thing we know for sure in the vet profession is that people will do just about anything for the animals they love. We could never imagine putting our dogs in the cargo hold of a plane. And neither could the 10 people on the inaugural flight of K9 Jets. The company was founded in response to a growing desire among pet owners to travel with their animals and mounting frustration at the increasingly challenging process of flying with them on commercial flights.The inaugural flight of K9 Jets was from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to Farnborough Airport, just southwest of London. The passenger manifest included nine dogs, mostly on the larger side, and one sphinx cat, as well as 10 humans.

Pakistan’s zoo troubles

Zoos in Pakistan have come under scrutiny after the death of a 17-year-old elephant named Noor Jeha in Karachi zoo, Pakistan. Noor Jehan, an African elephant, was already in poor health when she fell into a pond and was unable to get up, dying 8 days later. The international animal welfare charity Four Paws said that the Karachi zoo was not equipped to take care of elephants and had advised that Noor Jehan and her companion, Madhubala, needed to be moved to a more species-appropriate home. After Noor Jehan's death, there have been calls for Pakistan’s zoos to close due to criticism of conditions and renewed accusations of neglect at the country’s facilities.

Quick Hits

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

Charlotte veterinarian chalks up a win for diversity in the profession [WFAE]

Murphy the eagle is quirky [NYT]Seattle shelters seeing record number of surrenders [KIRO]Fossils reveal early animal life [Smithsonian Mag]