Urged for More Than Fifty Years: Veterinary Education in New Zealand, C1900-1964 (Report‪)‬

After the 1907 collapse of the new Otago University Veterinary School, a gap of over half a century elapsed before the Massey University Veterinary Faculty was opened in 1964. This interval means linear professionalisation accounts from pre-modern animal care by farriers and cow leeches to modern cadres of scientific veterinarians (2) are challenged by contingent and particular features in the New Zealand setting. The educational sequence is inevitably linked with other aspects of society, economy and workforce around the veterinary 'professional project'. (3) Limited research into veterinary development and education in New Zealand includes accounts by veterinarians--Laing's monographs, (4) Shortridge, Smith and Gardner's history of the veterinary profession, (5) and Burns' historical sociology thesis. (6) Thus while activity to establish a New Zealand veterinary school around 1900 drew on colonial and modernising discourses and examples of veterinary educational projects overseas, these were contextual to the historical events in this country. (7) Most of the thirty European veterinary schools set up in the late-eighteenth-early nineteenth centuries, were in response to European cattle epidemics. (8) The London Veterinary College (1791) (9) and the Edinburgh Veterinary School (1823) (10) shaped British and American colonial veterinary developments, and Glasgow's Veterinary School was opened in 1860. A British 1844 Royal Charter declared veterinary science a profession, and members of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) were to be distinguished by the title of veterinary surgeon. (11) Entry was controlled by the 'uni-portal' student examination, the only way to become a member (MRCVS) until 1948, when gaining a university degree became sufficient for registration. The British 1881 Veterinary Surgeons Act banned unqualified practitioners using any title, addition or description claiming special medical and surgical qualifications for treating animals. It listed qualified veterinarians on a Statutory Register, though many persons not formally qualified continued in practice. (12)