Abstract
By the year 2025 the domestic cat population of the western world will probably be twice as large as it is now, while the canine population will increase by only 30% over its current figures. As a consequence, the cat will become the main patient throughout the veterinary clinics of Europe and the rest of the western world, and Cat-Only Veterinary Clinics will be very common in many countries. Due to renal and cardiac transplantations being performed routinely in cats, feline life expectancy will be approximately 30 years. Cats and dogs will enjoy medi-care benefits just like their owners. In every major city there will be a Cat Cemetery. Cloning dead cats will be a popular thing to do and veterinarians will become more and more involved with this and other biotechnologies such as gene therapy, thanks to which diseases like diabetes mellitus, feline panleucopaenia or feline immunodeficiency will be easily curable. In this panorama, the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery will inevitably become a landmark in the field of feline medicine. It will probably be published bi-weekly and each issue will have 120 pages featuring contributions from all fields of medicine, from Cardiology to Cloning, from Dentistry to Neonatology, from Organ Transplantation to Transgenic Medicine. Furthermore, every other month there will be a special focus on one of the following issues: New Drugs being Experimented for Use in Cats; Emerging Feline Diseases; Feline Population Demographics; Feline Medical Teaching throughout the World; the Welfare of Felids in Captivity; Update on Feline Biotechnologies. Its impact factor will be the highest in the field of veterinary medicine, ranging between 2.5 and 3.2 and its review process, although still fairly quick due to the much increased list of reviewers on the editorial board (more than doubled with respect to when the journal was launched the previous century), will take on average 1.5 years due to the high number of papers being submitted every month. In the global feline village, the European Society of Feline Medicine will have, by the year 2025, changed its name from ESFM to ISFM. Guess what ‘I’ will stand for?
Some guesses may be very easy while others, especially if more crucial for our future, may be more difficult. The pace at which the western world is changing is faster every year, and keeping abreast of change is more important nowadays than ever before, especially for enterprises. Private veterinary practice is an entrepreneurial activity: those veterinarians who had the intuition of putting their strengths together starting the business of large veterinary practices and veterinary hospitals more than 60 years ago have made fortunes. Likewise, those who understood more than 30 years ago that veterinary medicine would soon start to need and benefit from specialists in many different fields, very soon established themselves and became famous. Being a visionary is a peculiarity of successful people. However, unlike what most think, having vision is not a gift or a quality but rather an art or a technique that can be learnt and improved. In order to be visionary it is necessary (a) to have a deep knowledge of the history of a certain problem and (b) to make a clear analysis of the present situation using the best available information. The difficult part is to filter available information, selecting it and working only on high quality, well refereed data, thereby enabling us to make forecasts. As veterinary clinicians, we should all have a very good vision as we normally try to anticipate the future every time that we visit an animal: we collect history, then analyse the present situation performing a clinical exam, after which we work on the data gathered to formulate a diagnosis and prescribe a treatment. The diagnostic-therapeutic process is therefore an attempt at anticipating the future.
What will the future of feline veterinary practice be like in 2025? Will we really be facing a 100% increase in the feline population? And if so, will it be more important to set up a Feline Hospital connected to the European Union Medi-Care system, to become competent in feline kidney/heart transplant or to establish a ‘Cat Cloning Company’ which provides everything from the funerary service to the birth of the cloned kitten? The only way to understand that is to carefully scrutinise the present reality by reading and studying current issues focusing our attention on information of the best quality. In 2025 the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery will certainly be there, and chances are that those veterinarians who will be more successful — be it in the cloning business or in organ transplantation or in running cat-only hospitals — will be long time subscribers of the journal you are now reading. As newly elected President of the European Society of Feline Medicine, I can assure you that of all the initiatives of our society, this journal is the initiative I am more proud of, because of the importance of the issues treated and the quality of the information conveyed to readers. Most, if not all, the merit for the success of the journal should be credited to the Editor Andrew Sparkes and to the Assistant Editor Claire Bessant for their tremendous amount of work, as well as to the Editorial Board, to WB Saunders, and of course to all the authors. Some of the original contributions in Volume 1 (1999) such as those on feline vestibular disorders from Richard LeCouteur and coworkers from California, USA, on feline diabetes from Jackie Rand and coworkers from Queensland, Australia, or some of the reviews such as the one on the clinical use of cytokine in therapy from Stephen Dunham from Scotland (just to cite one author/continent) are already landmarks in their fields, and will probably be among the most cited references in the feline bibliography of the following decades. To those working in scientific and clinical medicine, having access to up to date, high quality, well refereed scientific literature will always be an invaluable tool: the key to anticipating the future.
‘I look at the future because that is where I will spend the rest of my life’ (Edward D. Woods Jr).