146
A plea for a broader system of Veterinary Education
usually followed in India, and one may expect
in due course to see all the Indian veterinary
colleges affiliated with the local University and
turning out graduates to fill the more important
posts in the Civil departments, their work being
supplemented by Stockmen', a cheaper agency
which can be trained in a few months to carry
out much of the routine work for which a vete-
rinary department is required in India today.
In a previous article which appeared in this
journal for January, 1939, I endeavoured to
sketch the early development of the veterinary
profession and the establishment of veterinary
colleges in India, and those who are interested
are referred to that article for details. It is
sufficient in the present connection to record
the fact that there are 2,471 veterinary gradua-
tes in the employ of the Civil Governments in
India today. Of these, eighty are Members of
the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons,
England.
These men are employed on all
types of work, ranging from curative work in
veterinary hospitals to those more important
duties which may be included in the compre-
hensive title of Animal Health. This number
constitutes the majority of veterinary graduates
in the country, but by no means exhausts the
list, for others are employed in the Defence
Department, local bodies, private practice, etc.
In numbers, therefore, the veterinary pro-
fession in India is no mean part of the total
Empire services, but even then they are quite
inadequate for the prodigious number of animals
for whose health and improvement they should
be responsible. Apart from other animals, of
which there are many millions, there are over
200,000,000 cattle in India, about one-fourth of
the total cattle population of the world. Those
who have visited India will say: What cattle!
One could very well do without many of them.
This is true in part, but recent investigations
have shown that if India is to cultivate her land
properly and have sufficient milk for her wo-
men and children, she will require about that
number of cattle. But they must be better
cattle, and that is the major problem before
Indian Veterinary Departments of the future.
How can productivity of India's cattle, and
other animals, be increased within a reasonable
space of time? It certainly cannot be done by
the disjointed methods that have been adopted
in many parts of India in the past. A real
punch is required, and to get such a punch it
is essential that there should be livestock de-
partments (call them what you will) in each
province, in which all aspects of the subject
are closely coordinated by a master mind at the
top. It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that
livestock improvement will not succeed without
the help of the veterinarian, and the veterinary
profession must identify itself very closely with
livestock improvement and increased production
if it is going to survive as a separate entity, at
least in a country like India.
It may well be asked what the veterinary
profession in India has been doing all thses
years not to have seen that such an obvious
arrangement was made for the development of
the livestock of the country. Thirty-five years
ago when one made an application for a post in
the Indian service one was supplied with a me-
morandum which stated, amongst other things,
that one might be employed on administrative
work, teaching duties, or horse—and cattle
breeding. By the time that one arrived in the
country, however, all the important horse-breed-
ing areas had been removed from the control of
the Civil Veterinary Department, and a few
years later cattle-breeding in most of the provin-
ces followed suit. ' There was, of course, plenty
of other work for veterinary officers to do; in
particular, the ravages of rinderpest in most
provinces were of great concern, but this disease
is, fortunately, no longer the menace to live-
stock improvement that it used to be, thanks,
to the improved methods of vaccination now
employed.
The main plank in the argument of those in-
terested in removing cattle-breeding from the
control of the Veterinary Department was that
improvement of stock in India was almost enti-
rely a matter of better feeding, and a number of
centres were set up where feeding trials were
introducd, from the results of which we are
benefiting considerably today. It is, however,
now gradually being realized that animal nutri-
tion is only one of the items to be tackled in
order to effect permanent livestock improvement
and, moreover, to get the best results in animal
nutrition work one requires men whose main
subject has been animal physiology.
This is the crux of the matter. When research
workers in animal physiology were required,
they were not forthcoming from the veterinary
profession and they had to be found elsewhere.
Today, when animal geneticists are required,
there is the same story to tell. Many of the
advances made in veterinary helminthology
entomology, protozoology and even bacterio-
logy have been through the efforts of members-
of the medical profession and pure scientists.
There can be only one reason for this and that
is the system of veterinary education prevalent
in the past in British veterinary colleges, which
have catered largely for the practitioner class and