The root of veterinary medicine began in what scientists believe to be the early Roman Empire. Back then they were called souvetaurinarii which is where the word veterinarian stemmed from. They were considered animal caretakers that would be able to heal the family horses used to ride around town, or the cattle that you were planning on eating for dinner.
Back then animals weren’t kept as companions, and the only reason that they were worth anything was for transportation or eating. In this age everyone was working to make sure that they could sustain themselves and their family. They didn’t have time or supplies to keep animals around for any other purpose.
It wasn’t until the Egyptians started worshipping cats that an animal became known as pets. And back then it was a bit different. Cats were kept in palaces on streets in order to defend the people from ill rats or poisonous snakes. They became a hero in Egypt for protecting the pharaoh from things that would have killed them in that period. They didn’t have very good medicine, so if you got a disease from an animal there wasn’t much that you could do to fix it.
However, veterinary practices didn’t really become a routine thing until 1761 when Claude Bourgelat created a school in Lyon, France dedicated to helping the animals. At this point, horses and cattle were the animals that vets really worked on. They relied on horses as transportation and cattle for a lot of the food source. Without these animals you would be in a lot of trouble.
In this time, nobody really cared about saving cats. There were a lot of stray cats running the streets and they were believed to only be good for chasing away verman. But they weren’t worshipped anymore. They were just another part of the ecosystem.
By the time that cars started to become popular people no longer had a large need for horses. They became a liability more than a help. So now vets had to switch their focus yet again to stay in the job.
That’s when people started to really get into owning dogs. They were used a lot in hunting at the beginning and as time progressed they slowly worked their way into the hearts of humans everywhere. Soon it became a really common thing to have a dog. But again cats weren’t really kept as pets until the 1970s. Crazy, huh?
And that is the origin of vets! I hope you enjoyed!
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Here’s where I got my information-
A lot of it came from a class that I am taking about becoming a veterinary assistant on Ed2Go. I highly recommend!
https://knowledge.rcvs.org.uk/heritage-and-history/history-of-the-veterinary-profession/
https://www.petfinder.com/pet-adoption/cat-adoption/why-did-egyptians-worship-cats/
Animal Digest Fur Real 
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