Shifts

Opinion This veterinarian knows what our pets can’t tell us

How a telemedicine veterinarian thinks about his job.

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Beatrix Lockwood spoke to Abel Gonzalez, the clinical director at Dutch. Illustrations by Maya Scarpa for The Washington Post....more
Beatrix Lockwood spoke to Abel Gonzalez, the clinical director at Dutch. Illustrations by ...more

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Abel Gonzalez shifted from in-person veterinary work to telemedicine during the coronavirus pandemic. Treating his furry patients through a screen can sometimes be a challenge. “You can’t ask them what’s wrong,” he says. “You can’t even touch them.” But in some unexpected ways, his job has become easier. Gonzalez’s experience as a modern veterinarian helps us answer the question of what is lost and what is preserved as we increasingly communicate digitally, not just in medicine but in almost every aspect of our lives.

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For the past year, we’ve been speaking with workers across the continent whose jobs did not exist a generation ago to learn more about our new era of work — and what it means for our future. In these comics, you’ll hear from workers, who describe in their own words what they do for a living and how it has changed over time.
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