I sit down to write this having just watched the England Women's World Cup squad being beaten 1:0 by Spain. I'm not a football fan, preferring to watch rugby, whether that be my children playing at the local club or internationals, however I was sorry to see the England women lose the game. Did they succeed in coming second in the tournament or fail to win the top spot? Disappointed as they must be, they have once again done a huge amount of good for women's sport and that can only be a win!
Sport can be a metaphor for life. Last week the Scottish Higher results were published, this week it was the turn of the A-levels (and others such as T-levels). The media was awash with stories about how many students had got A or A* grades, how the grade bands had altered post-pandemic and how many students had got their first-choice university. At the veterinary schools we await the new intakes and look forward to these bright and talented young people starting a career in our amazing profession. Those that have secured places can be thought of as succeeding, but the hard work has only just begun. Not every aspiring veterinarian will have secured a place, even with the seemingly ever-increasing size of the intake, but they have not failed either. It is important those of you that have been helping and mentoring students seeking a place at vet school continue to support them, regardless of whether they got a place this year or not. Those unsuccessful on this occasion may well be able to find another route into the profession, or an associated profession. We have all had moments we consider to be a success and others when at the time it has felt as if we failed. Sometimes these are small and relatively trivial matters, but on occasion they change the direction of our careers or of our whole life. The secret is to keep trying to move forward with a positive attitude.
In our farm animal veterinary world, we also regularly experience small successes or what might be considered failures, e.g. the calf born alive after a protracted and difficult delivery, or the cow that loses a quarter to mastitis. However, we also see much larger scale successes, such as the eradication of brucellosis or foot and mouth disease from the UK. To return to the sporting analogy, since leaving the European Union the rules of the game by which we and our clients play have changed immeasurably. In England, we now have the Animal Health and Welfare Pathway (see James Russell's update on page p217) as part of the move away, firstly from production-driven subsidies within the EU to land-based payments and now to a post-Brexit focus on ‘public money for public good’. As Russell's article details this means several things, but for cattle vets in England perhaps we'll finally see some significant and lasting success on bovine viral diarrhoea (BVD) control to bring England closer to the progress we have seen in Scotland over the last 10–12 years.
More broadly, for our clients in England there are a number of changes to the farm payments on offer, perhaps the most far-reaching being those designed to improve the environment and biodiversity within the Countryside Stewardship Grants (https://www.gov.uk/countryside-stewardship-grants) or the wide-reaching Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sfi-handbook-for-the-sfi-2023-offer) for which the 2023 offer is due to open imminently. Aside from the obvious need to have a financially viable business, success in farming used to be measured in terms of production and yield. Increasingly it seems other measures outside of food production will apply, and we need to be aware of this and ready to help our clients succeed in this new era.