UPDATE: In addition to this advisory article to vets, the Principals and Directors of 26 individual veterinary practices across the lower North Island were sent an alert letter directly. The text of this letter and the list of its recipients are published at the bottom of this article.
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:
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.
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:
- 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.
- 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.
WARNING ALERT LETTERS SENT AS FOLLOWS (READERS - RECIPIENTS LIST FIRST, THEN LETTER):
Animates Vetcare Paraparaumu; Cahill Animal Hospital, Palmerston North; CareVets Kāpiti; CareVets Napier; VetsOne Hastings; Central Vet Hospital, Wellington; Central Vets, Palmerston North; The Cottage Veterinary Clinic, Clive; Crofton Downs Veterinary Clinic, Wellington; Energy Vets Taranaki, New Plymouth; New Plymouth Vet Group; Vets4Pets New Plymouth; First Vets Whanganui; Wanganui Veterinary Services; Hokowhitu Veterinary Clinic, Palmerston North; Pet Doctors Palmerston North; Horowhenua Vets, Levin; Kāpiti Emergency Vets, Ōtaki; Levin Vets, Levin; Ruapehu Vet Services, Ohakune; South Taranaki Vets, Hāwera; Taihape Veterinary Services; Taradale Veterinary Hospital, Napier; Taupō Veterinary Centre; Vetora Taupō; Totally Vets, Feilding.
18 June 2026
Dear Principal/s and Directors,
FORMAL NOTICE: Serious Clinical, Ethical, Administrative & Managerial Issues Impacting Pets Admitted to Massey University’s Companion Animal Hospital ICU
I write to advise you of multiple issues and vulnerabilities of which you must be made aware when referring your clients’ pets to Massey.
These are laid out in the enclosed Media Release and associated list of published Questions, so far remaining unanswered by the University’s Vice-Chancellor, Pierre Venter, and its Dean & Head of the School of Veterinary Science, Jon Huxley.
By this notice, you are hereby legally culpable if your clients’ animals – or your clients themselves – are the subject of the nature of outcomes, the victims of conduct, or the target of behaviours as have been clearly itemised and laid out in these two documents, and the extensive coverage on the two platforms on which they have been published.
Controlled Drug Register-unrecordable administrations of sedatives, (until advised otherwise by Massey) non-attendance by any licensed veterinarian during overnight shifts, unauthorised conversion of private pets to teaching stock, false diagnoses and coerced life terminations on the basis of these, fraudulent billing practices, and posthumous record manipulations, represent a clear and present danger to your own clients’ pets and by extension, also to your clients at the human level.
Further, you will note the citing of Privacy Act breaches vis a vis the use of a deceased patient’s clinical records to taunt the owner i.e. specifically, the author of this letter, and who has been the subject of the issues listed above – and additional matters as listed in the 60+ items of detailed published coverage on the public platforms listed in the signature block of this letter.
It should be noted that individuals openly and without restraint – by themselves, by practice management, or by Massey’s leadership – demonstrating this level of erratic, unprofessional behaviour are the exact same hands left unsupervised with your clients’ vulnerable animals overnight, to handle and monitor them, and with apparently carte blanche self-authority to dose with their choice of pharmaceuticals, including administering heavy sedation.
A culture that lacks baseline clinical and ethical discipline means that any animal you refer to Massey’s ICU is at direct risk of unmonitored neglect, undocumented, cowboy clinical decisions, and covert conversion by the University as a live teaching resource.
Assuming you take your clients’ data privacy and client confidentiality seriously, it should be of considerable concern to you that Massey has zero control over data security and allows its own clients’ private information to be handled with no safety guards and utilised by the inhabitants of such an unhinged environment – noting that the handling of this data is directly reflective of the handling and demise, in the case of the author, of the highly valued and pre-Massey viable pet to which it pertained.
You are urged to investigate, calculate, mitigate, and advise your own clients of, the risk to pets when being referred to the Massey University Companion Animal Hospital.
Sincerely,
Jordan Kelly
Editor-in-Chief, The Customer & The Constituent NZ www.thecustomer.co.nz
Executive Director, International Institute for Improvement in Veterinary Ethics (IIIVE) www.iiive.org
Masterton 5810, New Zealand
Enclosures: Media Release (15 June 2026) / ‘Questions’ Article (11 June 2026)
