The Multiple Hidden Liabilities in Every Massey Referral:  What Vets and Pet Owners Need to Know

This article serves as an advisory regarding the risks associated with admitting companion animals to the Massey University Companion Animal Hospital Intensive Care Unit (ICU) for overnight or extended stays.

It outlines specific vulnerabilities in patient care, drug administrations, owner-unauthorised invasive, hands-on utilisation of pets for student teaching activities, and - for referring vets, specifically - it details the downstream legal and insurance liabilities for the primary veterinary practices that refer clients to this facility.

The Core Risks in Massey's Companion Animal Hospital ICU Policies & Practices

When an animal is referred to an institutional ICU for extended or overnight monitoring, clients expect a continuous, high standard of professional oversight.

However, documented systemic issues at Massey University's Companion Animal Hospital (which it must be remembered is also otherwise known as its Veterinary Teaching Hospital) present significant hazards:

• Supervision Gaps:  Overnight care protocols may rely heavily on unsupervised junior staff or rotating personnel, without a registered veterinarian physically present. (Confirmation the contrary is still awaited from either Massey or the Veterinary Council of New Zealand.)
  
  
• Undocumented Drug Administration:  Massey's own Chief of Staff, Jodie Banner, has formally admitted in writing that non-controlled sedatives — including Gabapentin — bypass the Controlled Drug Register entirely. This means heavy, behaviour-altering pharmaceuticals can be administered to a privately-owned pet inside Massey's ICU with no mandatory record, no oversight mechanism, and no audit trail. (A detailed expose on this specific clear and present danger is in production; check back soon for its imminent publication.)
  
  
• Lack of Informed Consent:  Animals may be utilised in practical student training modules without the explicit, written consent of the owner - or indeed even without their knowledge. The outcomes of these practices can be fatal.

• Accountability Deficits and Documented Legal Suppression:  When untoward events occur — ranging from clinical incompetence to severe procedural errors to unauthorised and undisclosed, potentially lethal utilisation of private clients pets as live training specimens and practices condoning false diagnoses to obtain owner consent for "euthanasia" to avoid disclosure of this utilisation  — the institutional response has, in the demonstration of this Case Study, prioritised reputation management by way of institutional force, with the threat of legal action aimed at ensuring owners' compliant silence.

The Transfer of Legal and Insurance Liability

Many primary care veterinarians operate under the assumption that once a patient is transferred to a tertiary facility like Massey, their own legal liability terminates. This is a critical misconception.

• The Duty to Warn:  A referring veterinarian has a professional obligation to understand the operational realities of the facilities they recommend. If a primary vet fails to warn a client of documented risks, and an incident subsequently occurs, the primary vet can be held contributorily liable.

• Professional Indemnity Insurance Exposure:  If a client suspects negligence, malpractice, unauthorised student training activities conducted upon their pet, or clinical incompetence at the secondary facility, the primary vet's own professional indemnity and liability insurance is directly exposed. Because the primary vet initiated the referral chain without appropriate disclosures, the owner has grounds to pursue a claim against the referring clinic's policy.

This is not a hypothetical risk sitting somewhere in legal theory. It's the practical reality facing every clinic that continues to send clients' animals into an environment where the drug administration trail can vanish, where consent can be bypassed, and where the institution's own documented response to scrutiny has been to threaten the people who ask questions and seek accountability.

Bypassing the VCNZ: Direct Insurer Correspondence

When disputes arise, the standard advice is to lodge a complaint with the Veterinary Council of New Zealand (VCNZ).

However, data and documented evidence indicate this pathway is highly ineffective for consumers:

• Systemic Collusion:  Documented interactions demonstrate a close, protective relationship between the VCNZ regulatory apparatus and institutional bodies like Massey, compromising the regulator's impartiality.

• 1.5 Percent Prosecution Rate:  A peer-reviewed study published in the New Zealand Veterinary Journal in 2019 found that of 1218 complaints and notifications received by the VCNZ between 1992 and 2016, 818 — i.e. 67.2 percent — were not investigated or were dismissed outright. Only 18 complaints — 1.5 percent of the total — were upheld on the basis of technical competency concerns. To be clear, that is a grand total of just 18 complaints upheld across 24 years.

• The Conflict at the Heart of It:  That study was co-authored by Dr J.F. Weston of Massey University's School of Veterinary Science — the same Dr Jenny Weston who currently sits on the VCNZ Council.

• Inadequate Penalties:  In the rare instances where a complaint is upheld, the outcomes are overwhelmingly limited to minor "training recommendations" rather than substantive disciplinary action or licence suspension.

Options for Owners

If an incident occurs and the referring veterinarian refuses to address the complaint or take responsibility for the referral outcome, owners might want to consider bypassing the Veterinary Council of New Zealand entirely.

My own personal opinion, based on my own, drawn-out, intentionally ineffectual and still-in-progress experience with the VCNZ, is that this is an entirely captured agency, predominantly by Massey but also by way of its loyalties to the broader veterinary sector — which, it should be remembered, in New Zealand, is largely loyalty-beholden to Massey as most vets' own alma mater.

The VCNZ's modus operandi, in the clear demonstration of my own case with the tragic outcome of my own beloved pet, is to delay, obstruct, frustrate, and hope to exhaust a pet owner-complainant's will, with a view to either actively obstruct or ensure the dismissal of a complaint, or to naturally burn-out the complainant in order to achieve the ultimate fading away of the complaint. The VCNZ's own woeful - in fact, beyond negligible - prosecution rate provide clear, stark testament to this.

Thus, what an aggrieved pet owner might want to consider as an alternative first and most immediate step, is to identify the primary veterinarian's professional liability insurer and open correspondence directly with them. Insurers evaluate risk purely on financial exposure and strict liability, making them far more responsive to unmanaged practice risks than a compromised regulatory board.

Conclusion:  Deconstructing Traditional Trust & Naivete

The historical model of unquestioning, naive trust in the veterinary industry leaves companion animals highly vulnerable - and worse still, at the most vulnerable moments in their life cycles.

Pet owners must take active responsibility for investigating where their animals are being sent and under what specific conditions they will be held overnight and during the course of any period of stay when the owner will not be present with them.

When facing a referral, owners  should directly and explicitly notify their primary veterinarian that they understand the legal and insurance consequences available to them  should the referral facility  fail to meet baseline standards of competent care or convert their companion animal - which remains their legal private property - for unauthorised use as an institutional educational, film production, or commercial resource.

IMPORTANT NOTE TO PET OWNERS: 

Under New Zealand's Animal Welfare Act 1999, companion animals are recognised as sentient beings, and in civil/property law, they remain the legal property and chattels of their owners.

Converting private property for unauthorised commercial use (like student training or film production, as you will see here having been the case with the author's own pet, Harry, a blind papillon obviously offering Massey's Dr Steffi Jalava and Dr Anita Shea additional student interest teaching value vis a vis his blindness, which veterinary codes of practice should have ensured, as a disability, resulted in greater care, not training utilisation) without consent is an actionable legal violation.

Go here, for the full story (with regular updates) of the intentional, repeated, catastrophic levels of overdosing with an unnecessary, contraindicated, convenience sedative; his covert conversion to University utilisation as a live teaching specimen; and the fabricated diagnosis manufactured by Drs Shea and Jalava to support Jalava's aggressive coercion of Harry's owner (by plan, misrepresenting his undisclosed sedated state as a sudden "neurological decline") to achieve immediate, in-situ for the later-discovered-to-be completely unnecessary termination of his life.

Harry's owner, the author of this advisory article, has been subject to all the acts (and more) outlined herein - with the quest for accountability ongoing and being strenuously resisted by Massey's management, with the Veterinary Council of New Zealand in full and active support of Massey's obstruction and perversion of natural justice.