As far back as I can remember, I have always wanted to be a vet. I grew up in a rural environment, alongside farm animals, but also in the Paris region, in a privileged environment, among the many wildlife birds at the time, and "companion" dogs. I was lucky to be awakened by my Norman grandmother of peasant origin to the needs and sensitivity of animals, as well as to the magic of living things and the infinite respect we owe her. Very young, I had the chance to be educated on the needs of each individual, their capacities, their intelligence as well as on the multiple ways and means that we humans had to know them, understand them, help them and their give everyone a good life. This is probably where my passion for animals and my vocation as a veterinarian comes from.
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As a teenager, I developed a taste for science and medicine. I paid the greatest attention to the kindness that my father-in-law, a doctor, showed towards his patients. This empathy for the most vulnerable has never left me since.
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My first years of veterinary studies were marked by the great joys of the somewhat carefree life of a graduate student but also by enormous shocks and disappointments about what humans could inflict on animals. I was amazed to discover the dread and terror of the animals during their loading and transport to the slaughterhouse, during their stay there and at the time of slaughter. The unhappiness of so many of them in breeding. It is certainly there that I first became aware that our poor domestic animals, companionship, farm or work, paid dearly for the shelter, the security and the food that "man offered them".
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What moved or amazed me the most about these times? The frustrations and unhappiness of animals linked to their confinement, their captivity, the promiscuity and the impossibility they had to express their normal behaviors and to satisfy their daily needs? Or the so relentless cruelty and the total lack of sensitivity that we humans showed towards them? It is perhaps there that this vocation of "protector of animals" was conceived.
35 years later in any case, I am convinced that this is where the heart of our missions lies: knowing and understanding the nature and the needs of each animal in order to better and sustainably "protect" it and bring it help and assistance, work with all our strength so that the greatest number of human beings:
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Understand the intelligence and sensitivity of animals and each individual, which makes them both so different but so close to us,
Hold them in a responsible and benevolent manner,
Struggle fiercely against the many cruelties inflicted, consciously or not, sometimes more out of ignorance than malice, humans on animals.
It is in this sense that I founded the association AVA.