Vetinerary surgeons are very much the gods of today – we used to give our sun worshipping allegience to the hospital consultants and we would see them fawning on the ward when they did their rounds every day. Now it is the day of the vet. With there being so many inspirational programmes on tv, we can be forgiven for thinking that all we have to do is turn up at the surgery, attend a few lessons and hey presto, here come the vet’s qualification. Nothing could be further from the truth. It takes 7 years to train to be a vet – that’s longer than a doctor of human beings. The variety and complexity of vet’s work includes not bein able to speak to animals – humans can generally make themselves understood by language and hand signals, but animals need another approach. There are all sorts of pre-training courses that help a student come to terms with whether theyu will be able to take the challenge of becoming a vet.