As part of his political campaign, Mariano Gaido promoted a video participating in surgery.
The Argentine Veterinary Federation, which brings together schools and councils distributed throughout the country, issued a statement in which it repudiated “the active participation in the sterilization of animals” of the mayor of the city of Neuquén, Mariano Gaido, “for purposes exclusively proselytizing”.
On February 25, the community chief of the Neuquén capital made a live broadcast through his Instagram account that later went viral, where he carried out the castration of a cat at the Animal Welfare facilities of the Municipality, accompanied by the Undersecretary of Healthy City, Andrea Ferracioli.
In the video, Gaido was assisted by the president of the Neuquén College of Veterinarians, Guadalupe Plumet Garrido, and by the referent of the Ethics Committee of the same entity, Lucio Agúndez, both municipal officials.
The provincial deputy (PRO) and veterinary doctor Leticia Esteves, expressed: “One trains, studies and forms permanently to give the best care to their patients, and the trivialization of a surgical intervention is the opposite message that we veterinarians try to give, since anesthetizing the patient and undergoing surgery is always at risk of life”.
“I understand that the mayor wants to know what the management is and tour the facilities, but allowing him to participate in surgery and do a ‘live’ in the middle of an operating room seems very serious to us,” said the legislator.
For his part, the president of the College of Veterinarians of the province of Buenos Aires, Osvaldo Rinaldi, addressed Plumet Garrido through a note in which he stated that “it is inadmissible for a public official, for exclusively proselytizing purposes, to commit a crime and endangers public health that should be protected”.
He also indicated that the agency will make “the corresponding criminal complaint, in order to prosecute the commission of the crime of illegal exercise typified in article 247 of the Penal Code, as well as the acts of animal cruelty committed, in the terms of Law 14,346”.
The College of Veterinarians of the province of Mendoza also adhered to the repudiation and indicated that “the active participation in animal castration of a person who is not a veterinarian, the null conditions of sterility and hygiene that are observed, and the lack of ethics and Veterinary professionalism should not be overlooked.”
