This week is Veterinary Assistant Week, and a piece in DVM360 made a case for something that most of us probably know already: practices are underusing their VAs, and that underuse has a real cost. When assistants are trained and deployed to their full capacity, they free up credentialed technicians to perform the clinical tasks that require their credentials, and they free up DVMs to practice at the top of their license.

The authors frame VA investment as a practice efficiency decision, not just a morale or recognition exercise. A well-trained assistant handling patient flow, discharge education, and basic prep work is creating time for everyone above them on the team. That time has dollar value. It also has a burnout-reduction value that is harder to quantify but probably more important.

Veterinary Assistant Week is the perfect time to recognize the value of VAs in your practice, and better understand how they can be utilized to realize gains across your workforce.

Happy Veterinary Assistant Week. Do us a favour, and tell your colleagues how great they are. This week and every week.

A study published this week in Nature Communications from the Dog Aging Project analyzed fecal metagenomics data from more than 900 companion dogs across the U.S., linking gut microbiome composition to age, diet, and health markers. The headline finding: microbial shifts associated with aging in dogs closely mirror patterns seen in humans, which makes companion dogs an increasingly compelling model for translational aging research. The researchers also developed a metagenomics-based model that can predict a dog's biological age from its microbial signature alone.

This tells us two things to consider for practice:

These are the kinds of things clients ask about constantly, and having peer-reviewed data behind the conversation is useful.

The broader significance is the scale of the dataset and the quality of the methodology. The Dog Aging Project has been building population-level longitudinal infrastructure for years, and studies like this one are starting to pay off.

Vet school can be expensive and is about to get even more costly for many US students. While previous federal loans could cover much of the cost of a veterinary education, that is changing soon.

On July 1, U.S. federal Grad PLUS loans are eliminated for new borrowers, and direct federal loan caps for professional programs drop to $50,000 per year and $200,000 over the life of a degree. For most veterinary schools, that annual cap does not cover the cost of attendance. Tuition, fees, and living expenses at the majority of U.S. programs exceed $50,000 per year before a student buys a single textbook. Students starting this fall will be the first cohort to feel the full weight of these changes.

The VIN Foundation's "40 in 60" project — school-by-school loan projections for all 40 U.S. and Caribbean veterinary programs — made clear what the gap looks like in practice. Where federal loans fall short, students will need private loans: higher rates, fewer repayment protections, less flexibility in a down year. Forty percent of last year's graduates already carried more than $200,000 in educational debt. The incoming class will be managing that kind of load with a less favorable borrowing structure underneath it.

The workforce implications will not be immediate, but debt pressure shapes early career decisions: which practice settings new graduates consider, whether they pursue specialty training, how much geographic flexibility they have. A profession that is already working through access-to-care questions in rural and underserved markets should be paying close attention to anything that makes it harder to become a veterinarian in the first place.

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: