Professional Journeys into the Social Science of Veterinary Medicine

The aim of this chapter is to reflect on the importance of veterinary humanities and social sciences for the study of animal research and the veterinary profession. Rather than use a standard academic chapter format, the authors have adopted a more playful, informal approach. This approach allows them to combine personal details about their very different professional biographies (as a Canadian ethologist and British sociologist), with summaries of their own work to date, and reference to wider academic literature. The chapter reflects on their path into the field, and the challenges and opportunities of a veterinary humanities and social science approach to their topic of study. They conclude that one key advantage is that the field welcomes, even necessitates, attempts by researchers to engage in reflexivity. Their aim in this chapter is to demonstrate this openly, and consider the issues that individually they wish they had known earlier in their careers.