As I've Warned in Previous Articles, It Didn't Start with Harry and, If Something Isn't Done About Massey's Veterinary Teaching Hospital aka 'Companion Animal Hospital', It Won't End with Him, Either.

Above: Staining that wasn't there around Harry's muzzle when he was left in the "care" of ICU staff the previous night at Massey's Companion Animal "Hospital". Did it result from the catastrophic, intentional, repeated convenience sedation by ICU staff and the day veterinary personnel? Pictured being filmed during multiple owner-unauthorised, highly invasive student "teaching" procedures in his state of resultant pharmacological collapse, after having been disconnected for the purpose from the rehydration for which he had actually been admitted (and which, following the massive overdoses, was now life-essential).
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Since I began publishing my documented account of what was done to Harry at Massey University's Companion Animal "Hospital" (and dear God, what wasn't done to him?), other pet owners have reached out.
Some by email through the site. Some face-to-face. Some by phone.
None of them knew each other. None of them knew me before they read my coverage. And none of them needed to compare notes — because the notes compared themselves.
What follows is an anonymised account of what they told me. Names, identifying details and specific circumstances have been withheld — partly to protect people who are still grieving (some still traumatised years later), partly because some of them were still trying to have Massey "hear" them and weren't ready to go on record until they had tried every possible formal channel (albeit they seemed to have already done so), partly because some fear what I didn't: Massey deploying the full force of its external legal services budget against them to shut them down.
And partly because the point isn't who they are. The point is what they experienced. And what they experienced, in case after case, mirrors what was done to Harry with a consistency that can only be described as deeply and culturally ingrained.
The ICU Ward Where Empathy Goes to Die . . . and the Template Accusation
One reader — a multi-pet owner who had several animals treated at Massey's Companion Animal Hospital over a period of time — contacted me after sharing my ICU article on her social media platform, where it received an estimated 40,000 views and a large number of horrified user comments. My article helped her draw daylight to her own experiences, following the nature of what she had endured from Massey's ICU staff with regard to her own pets.
She told me that on one occasion, with a dog in the ICU, she had been promised a progress update call from staff. When that call hadn't come by around 2am, she rang the hospital herself. When she was put through to the ICU, she could hear her dog crying loudly in distress in the background. The staff appeared unperturbed — and more interested in having a debate with her about the call than in attending to the dog.
What followed was a summoning. She was called into the hospital and placed in a room with two members of staff. She was accused of having distracted ICU staff for approximately 40 minutes, and told this was unacceptable. Her own phone records showed the call was a mere fraction of that duration. Massey's version of events was simply false — and she had the evidence to prove it.
One staff member went as far as to claim that a dog had died because of her distraction — placing the blame for that death squarely on the distressed pet owner who had simply called to check on her own pet.
The accusation — summoning a distressed pet owner into a room and blaming them for the institution's failures — appears to be a template response . . . at least for one specific staff member. I know this because a version of the same tactic was deployed against me by Dr Steffi Maja Jalava herself when I was desperately, and in vain, trying to find out what had happened to Harry's "remains" (it still pisses me off to the back teeth to use the words, "remains" and "ashes", about a beloved, treasured little dog who still should be very much alive) — implying that my call had compromised another patient's care, although stopping short of claiming an animal had actually died.
(And, just as an aside, when Practice Manager Pauline Nijman finally "responded" to my repeatedly unanswered emails about Harry's body and ashes, it wasn't with any answers. It was with a "Mother Superior" email informing me that her staff had "gone above and beyond. They had indeed. They had gone above and beyond - under her specific watch - to covertly, catastrophically, repeatedly and unnecessarily over-sedate Harry with a specifically contraindicated sedation agent; to secretly convert him from a private, paying patient into a (still-paying) teaching resource for owner-unconsented, invasive observational testing and filming on cell phones, and then to cook up a plot to maintain the catastrophic over-sedation so that he could be presented back to me later that afternoon as suddenly and mysteriously "neurologically failing" and apparently requiring immediate, non-negotiable "euthanasia".
When 'Euthanasia' Is the Easy Go-To Cover-Up Strategy
A lifestyle block pet had been given a terminal prognosis by a Massey farm animal vet, who recommended immediate euthanasia on the basis of a clinical assessment that a non-Massey vet subsequently identified as not only inaccurate, but as one that appeared designed to deflect from a prior clinical failure by the Massey vet.
The doubting owners sagely sought a second, non-Massey veterinary opinion. The loved pet lived in good health for another four years.
'Of Course He's Been Outside to the Toilet', Students Assured the Owners of A Dog So Sedated It Couldn't Stand
A dog being treated at Massey's ICU was brought through to its waiting owners unable to stand — collapsing to the floor.
The owners recognised immediately that it had been given a sedative. They asked whether the dog had been toileted recently — knowing that in its current state, it could not possibly have been walked outside.
The two students in charge of the dog assured them it had.
The claim was demonstrably false, but in an attempt to be believed, one of the students put her arms underneath the dog's belly and attempted to haul it to its feet to prove it could stand. It could not and kept collapsing back to the floor.
When 'Urgent' Means Nothing
A separate account described how an urgent diagnostic sample requiring international courier to a specialist laboratory sat unprocessed at Massey for weeks, despite repeated follow-up by the owners.
When the matter was finally escalated in writing, the response from Massey staff was dismissive — to the effect that the hospital had many competing demands and could not prioritise individual cases.
The sample was eventually sent . . . but with the obvious delay to the determination of a life-essential treatment plan.
'Some of Our Students Don't Like Noisy Dogs'
One account included a concerningly caustic comment made by a senior member of Massey's teaching staff — recounted verbatim by the pet owner who heard it — in response to a dog crying audibly in the ICU:
"It's just as well we don't have any students here right now. Some of them don't like noisy dogs."
A teaching hospital. Where some of the student vets apparently don't like noisy dogs. Their intolerance fully blessed and supported by the teaching staff.
You'd have to ask yourself why those "students who don't like noisy dogs" want to be veterinarians in the first place . . . and what sort of veterinarians they will actually be when released out into private clinics, where - God forbid - they might encounter a noisy dog or three.
The Ethics Committee Member Who Walked Away
Information also reached me — although I was unable to verify it independently — regarding a member of a Massey University ethics committee who had resigned, apparently in disgust at institutional practices.
Whether that resignation was from the committee specifically or from Massey University itself was unclear.
'We Regret It to This Day'
“Good luck with your investigation and I truly hope you do get people to tell you about their experiences and that Massey is held accountable for their terrible care of dogs."
A verbatim quote from a reader who contacted this platform through the website's contribution form.
She described taking her dog to Massey in 2022 on the recommendation of her vet. When she was collected following a procedure, "she was worse than when she had gone in".
Her obviously deeply loved "wee dog" died three weeks later.
In her own words: "Definitely feel your pain."
We exchanged several emails but she declined to speak further on record. Four years on, she remains too traumatised to revisit what happened: "The grieving took so long to get over and I don't want to relive it, hence why I would never get another dog."
(Editor's Note: I too am in the same place as this reader. I've had dogs all my life, from childhood until Harry, with almost no gaps. I adore dogs. I've given up career positions for them when they needed me more than I needed corporate life. But what Dr Steffi Maja Jalava and her evil cohorts did to Harry - and the thought that another dog would almost certainly end up being treated by a Massey graduate at some point during its life with all the associated risks - makes the entire concept untenable for me.)
The Cocked-Up Chemotherapy
A retail staff member in the Wairarapa region recounted, in a visibly distressed and tearful condition, the experience of having her dog treated for cancer at Massey's Companion Animal Hospital.
The dog had been receiving a course of chemotherapy. He was becoming progressively weaker — and she felt strongly that something was wrong beyond the cancer itself.
The dog's owner later learned from an external professional that the chemotherapy protocol being used was meant to follow a specific "time on, time off" pattern — a standard requirement of oncological treatment designed to allow the patient's body to recover between cycles.
She had never been told this and it certainly wasn't happening. The young staff handling her dog's treatment had administered it intensively and without the clinically mandated pauses — apparently without knowledge of, or regard for, the correct application of the protocol.
Her dog died.
(Editor's Horrified Note: What sort of a basic, fundamental fuck-up is that for any place of purportedly professional, qualified veterinary "treatment" and "care"?)
The Pattern Is the Point: It Evidences A Toxic Environment. And for Your Pets . . . Literally.
Again, these and other accounts came to me unsolicited. None of these people (or indeed any of the others I have since spoken to) knew each other.
They contacted me independently of each other, in direct response to my published documentation of what was done to Harry. Many specific elements of what they described, as readers following Harry's case will clearly see, mirror that documentation with a consistency that speaks for itself.
Communication failures that aren't so much "failures" as intentional and contemptuous information roadblocks.
Aggressive "euthanasia" recommendations that not only proved 100 percent unnecessary but that were designed, in actual fact, to obscure clinical cock-ups.
Potentially lethal levels of undisclosed convenience sedation administered without owner knowledge.
Junior, inexperienced staff conducting procedures way above their pay grades.
Urgent clinical matters left unattended for weeks.
A fundamental chemotherapy protocol error followed by the death of the dog.
And a senior staff member who, when a pet owner called in distress to check on her suffering animal, responded by accusing her of causing the death of another . . . which appears to be an emotionally manipulative habit deployed to achieve psychological superiority . . . in direct keeping with Massey's very own special brand of keeping its paying clients "in line".
This Is A CULTURE. And A Very, Very Dangerous One for Owners to Entrust Their Pets To.
This is not a series of isolated incidents. This is a culture. And a deeply embedded one.
If you need any more evidence of that, the many juvenile, taunting anonymous emails I have referred, in other articles, to having received from (very clearly) Massey insiders, have just been followed by another one. Quite literally, with flawless and perfect timing, as I was completing this article for tonight's publication. Real-time proof of a highly toxic culture in action.
Again, very obviously from a "clinical" staffer and one who had direct access to Harry's Massey records, it demonstrates appalling, fundamentally flawed veterinary "knowledge" and "training", as well as basic errors of logic spottable by the average 14-year-old. Or younger.
And all of which are beyond ludicrous in the face of the detailed evidence in my now 50+ articles, to say nothing of the 342-page evidential report I have submitted to the Ministry of Primary Industries' Animal Welfare Complex Cases Unit investigation team who, the anonymous emailer and his or her counterparts may be well assured, don't launch expensive and extensive, multi-month cruelty investigations based on a pet owner's "conspiracy theories" . . . the taunt with which this latest Massey masterpiece concludes i.e. inviting me to "get (my) knickers into even more of a twist and fall down an even deeper conspiracy theory".
No doubt, this Reader Feedback article on which I'm about to hit the Publish button, will send the anonymouses (singular or plural, who knows and who cares) into another defensive tailspin. And no doubt, Massey's highly compensated legal defence machinery and its protective industry insiders will attempt to dismiss these replicated client accounts as some collection of disjointed "conspiracy theories".
But they now have to face a very cold, very public reality: the "conspiracy theorists" are their own paying clients. And when those clients - who have never met and thus have never compared their experiences - report the exact same systemic failures independently of one another, the narrative ceases to be a "theory". It becomes an established, documented pattern.
Fellow pet owners, these are the individuals to which you are entrusting the care of your beloved pets behind closed doors.
But Wait. There's More.
I have yet more to disclose regarding my own experiences with this callous, cruel, incompetent veterinary hellhole.
Harry's predecessor was a majestic yet playful collie/Alsation cross, Yanni. A truly magnficent creature, and just like Harry, the apple of his Mummy's eye. A "toy boy" because he was almost never seen without one of his numerous soft toys in his mouth, which he would attempt to tease you with.
When Yanni developed a cancer, I was initially - for some months - making the long drive from the deep South up the island, over the inter-island ferry, and up to Massey, with he and his brother, Vette (a cheeky border collie/papillon cross who, thankfully, never having been taken anywhere near Massey, lived to 19.5 years of age).
Eventually the long, multi-day haul became too physically taxing, so I moved to Wellington to get Yanni near to Massey for treatment. No sooner had I moved and taken on a lease in addition to still owning property in the deep South, when - in asking the (middle-aged male) vet what naturopathic options might be available for Yanni's treatment, I was told swiftly and cruelly: "If that's a conversation you want to have, you can come and take your dog back right now."
Other delightful memories of Massey staff included the young (early to mid-20s) front counter receptionist, who - on the day I had to do the unthinkable concerning Yanni, and walked in clutching as many of his soft toys as I could carry - smirked sadistically at me, cruelly holding my tearful gaze all the way until I was out of her line of sight.
When Harry came into Massey's occasional "care", I eventually endeavoured to tell a senor staff member about that despicable event. She didn't want to know, dismissing me with an unconcerned, "Oh, we've got completely different staff on the front desk now,"
The Sadism, the Nastiness & the Psychological Cruelty (and the Clinical Cruelty) Is Right On Brand
Practice Manager Pauline Nijman absolutely didn't want to know.
Which makes a complete lie of the, "Oh, we've got completely different staff on the front desk now" flick-off, because it's EXACTLY the scene that repeated itself when I was called in to (as it turned out, give totally UNinformed consent for the totally UNnecessary, planned-by-Dr-Steffi-Jalava-and-co, fraud-based) clinical killing of my precious little Harry.
Want specifics, Nijman?
I know you don't, but have them anyway: Light/blondey coloured "big" hair, big glasses, somewhere between late 30s and early to mid-40s . . . and someone I hadn't seen on your front desk before. And a really nasty, wicked "smile". And a vibe you don't expect to find in a place of veterinary "care". Unless we're talking about Massey's "Companion Animal Hospital", of course.
There, it's completely on brand.
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