Two Veterinarians Honored Among This Year's Future Perfect 50
Catalina Lopez, DVM
Crystal Heath, DVM
This year, two veterinarians, Drs. Crystal Heath and Catalina Lopez were featured among Vox’s Future Perfect 50 which highlights “the scientists, thinkers, scholars, writers, and activists working on solutions to today’s (and tomorrow’s) biggest problems.”
Dr. Lopez is the Director of the Aquatic Animal Alliance, a project under the Aquatic Life Institute. Lopez is a much-needed leader in the movement for fish welfare. Previously, during her work for Mercy for Animals, she influenced more than 100 companies to commit to sourcing eggs from chickens not kept in tiny cages. Fish are the most numerous animals slaughtered in food production and are intensively confined in ways that compromise their welfare, but their plight has garnered little attention despite much scientific evidence that they feel pain, have emotions, and have complex social interactions just like human beings and other species.
In 2020, Aquatic Life Institute scored a major victory when Global GAP agreed to implement ALI’s welfare standards, which included “banning the gruesome practice of cutting off female shrimps’ eyestalks to induce fertility.” Now, under the direction of Lopez, the Aquatic Animal Alliance helps set welfare standards for industrially confined and slaughtered fish around the world. They also advocate for policy proposals such as banning octopus farming and recommending fish be protected under European Union slaughter laws to ensure stunning before killing instead of “being suffocated to death or cut open while still alive.”
Dr. Heath is a shelter veterinarian who not only helps those in her community but travels overseas to provide access to medical care to animals who desperately need it. Her advocacy and extensive public records work uncovered the corporate capture of the veterinary profession—how industry influence led to harmful practices like the mass-killing of farmed animals via heatstroke to become legitimized by the American Veterinary Medical Association’s (AVMA) Guidelines, allowing companies to receive taxpayer-funded bailouts when their animals were killed this way during emergencies and infectious disease outbreaks.
As a result of her work, she faced a coordinated smear campaign by the industry, and the AVMA barred her and her colleagues from attending their Humane Endings Symposium. Realizing veterinarians, veterinary students, and animal professionals feared backlash for voicing concerns about unethical practices; she founded Our Honor, an organization that supports and empowers animal professionals by providing scholarships, free veterinary continuing education courses, and support in their advocacy efforts.
Humanity’s relationship with other species is perhaps one of the most important areas of change needed to ensure food security and mitigate threats to public health and the environment as the human population grows to 10 billion by 2058. Featuring these two veterinarians among the Future Perfect 50 shows the vital role the profession plays in protecting our future by extending kindness to other species.
