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Williams: Proposition 129 helps, not hurts, pets 

Emily Williams
Valley Voices
Emily Williams.
Courtesy photo

As a pet owner, West Vail resident, and long-time member of the board of directors of the Dumb Friends League, I am writing to ask you to support Proposition 129.

Proposition 129 creates a new position in the veterinary field called a veterinarian professional associate. This is a mid-level position, equivalent to a professional assistant in human health medicine. A veterinarian professional associate will be specially trained to support veterinarians by handling some routine tasks that veterinary technicians are not allowed to do, such as conducting wellness exams, prescribing medicine, and performing limited surgical procedures, all under the supervision of a Colorado licensed veterinarian. 

Veterinarian professional associates will be credentialed. Proposition 129 explicitly directs the Colorado Board of Veterinary Medicine to establish rules and regulations about veterinarian professional associates, just like it does for veterinarians and vet techs. There are currently no credentialing processes or liability insurance procedures in place because one cannot credential or insure a job that does not yet exist.



Colorado State University, one of the leading veterinary education programs in the country, has already developed a robust educational program to accommodate this new position. CSU’s proposed veterinarian professional associate curriculum is a five-semester master’s degree in clinical care that requires 65 credits to graduate (nearly double most master’s degrees) and includes more hours in preclinical surgical training and dentistry than the current curriculum for veterinarians (108 hours for veterinarian professional associates versus 105 hours for doctors of veterinary medicine for preclinical surgical; and 60 hours vs. 21 hours for dentistry). While CSU’s veterinarian professional associate training curriculum does have an online component to accommodate working and rural students, it also includes almost 400 hours of in-person labs.

In an ideal world, all pet owners would have ample access to care from a veterinarian. Unfortunately, that is not our reality. Simply put, there is a huge shortage of veterinarians in Colorado, and it is only going to get worse.

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Nationally by 2030, 55,000 new veterinarians will be needed to meet the growing demand for pet care. That’s according to a report by Mars Veterinary Health, which has a global network of 3,000 veterinary clinics. Even accounting for all the new veterinary graduates entering the field over the next 10 years, that still equates to a shortfall of 24,000 veterinarians, leaving an estimated 75 million pets without care. Currently, on average it takes almost 11 months to fill an open veterinarian position.

For veterinarians who prefer not to work with a veterinarian professional associate, the answer is simple: Don’t hire one. However a small group of dissenting veterinarians shouldn’t have veto power over all veterinary professionals, animal welfare organizations, ranchers and pet owners who support this initiative. 

Proposition 129 has been endorsed by Gov. Jared Polis, The Denver Post, the Dumb Friends League, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, The Humane Society of the United States, and many licensed veterinarians.

If you wish to learn more about Proposition 129 and CSU’s veterinarian professional associate curriculum, visit AllPetsDeserveVetCare.com. If you care about keeping pets safe and healthy, you will join me in voting “yes” on Proposition 129.  

Emily Williams is a lawyer and art appraiser who lives in West Vail. From 2017-2024, she served on the board of directors of the Dumb Friends League, the Rocky Mountain region’s largest open-admission animal shelter, which serviced 21,000 animals last year.


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